


Unforgivable

by AlexMeg



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angry Dean Winchester, Angst and Tragedy, Angst with a Happy Ending, Brotherly Love, Car Accidents, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotionally Hurt Sam, Gen, Grieving Dean Winchester, Guilty Dean Winchester, Guilty Sam, Hurt Sam Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, More Hurt Than Comfort, Sad Dean Winchester, Sad Sam, Suicidal Sam, There is Comfort Though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-13
Updated: 2017-07-06
Packaged: 2018-08-22 06:14:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 44,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8275673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlexMeg/pseuds/AlexMeg
Summary: Some things may seem unforgivable, but sometimes, those things are not as they seem. Sometimes, the whole story turns out to be far worse in a completely different and unexpected way. "He — he was my brother, my baby brother. And I realized that after I lost him."Rated for swearing and sensitive themes. Not a death fic. Story told in Dean's P.O.V (second person).





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> (This was originally posted on fanfic).
> 
> https://m.fanfiction.net/s/8713965/1/Unforgivable

**October, 2005**

 

You see two young boys — _brothers_. The older one, you estimate, looks to be about twelve years old, while the younger one looks to be about seven. And you realize how much they remind you of you and your own little brother when you were their age, how the younger boy has long, floppy, blond hair that reaches a few inches from his shoulders, and the older one has short, dark brown hair.

You watch quietly from where you are standing just a few feet away from the swing set as the older one — who was holding a football with a hole releasing air and rapidly deflating, becoming soft and pressable — yells at his brother in anger while the younger one listens wordlessly with his head ducked down, tears flowing freely down his soft cheeks in silence, mumbling hesitantly every once in a while. You may be standing far away from them, and the voices sound muffled, but you can still mildly make out the words the older one was screaming.

"Look what you did! You broke _my ball_!"

"I — I didn't mean to. I'm sorry."

"Sorry doesn't cut it you idiot! I told you to stay away from my stuff!"

The park was small and vacant, the only people around are you, the two brothers and three other kids who are playing by the slides, pushing each other and laughing brightly under the golden sunlight.

You watch as the younger brother releases a tiny whimper and finally breaks down completely, running away.

The older one rolls his eyes, a sneer twisting his features. You watch as he starts walking towards the park bench situated on the side, facing the sandbox, and he sits down and slumps his shoulders as he stares quietly at his ball, and a flash of anger passes through his face again at the sight of it.

You furrow your eyebrows and start walking towards the bench too. It seems that the boy felt your presence because he looks up at you just when you reach the bench and settle beside him.

"So, he broke your ball?" you ask conversationally and look at him.

"Why do you care?" he snaps discourteously at you, and you raise your hands up in a surrendering manner.

"Just trying to be friendly here, dude," you answer, leaning back on the bench easily.

"Well I don't need any of your friendliness, or your pity if that's what it probably is," he sneers.

"Nah, pity? Over a ball? That's not really worth something to be pitied over," you say casually as you lean back on the bench, shrugging when he glares at you angrily.

"That was my favorite ball!" he bellows furiously. "And that stupid brat broke it!"

"Look, I know you're probably mad at your brother but — "

" _And_ he's not my brother!" he yells again, and then his voice lowers down into an angry mutter, directed mostly to himself. "Don't even know why my parents adopted him."

And that's when you know the problem, all the while trying your best to ignore the former outburst (because it reminds you too much of your own mistakes).

"So that's the problem..." you think aloud, and he looks at you with a furrowed brow, so you continue. "This isn't really about the ball, is it? This isn't really just some ordinary sibling fight over a stupid toy — it's because he's adopted."

"Yeah, so?" he asks carelessly.

"So? He doesn't deserve that treatment from you just because he's adopted," you reason. "He's still your brother, no matter what you think. Your Mom didn't give him birth, sure, but he's still family."

"And who are _you_ to tell _me_ that?" the boy questions curtly.

"Didn't your parents ever teach you manners?" you say, just as snidely as him, as your patience starts to wear thin.

The boy just turns his head away and rolls his eyes.

You lean in close, trying to catch the boy's eyes. "He may not be your real brother, kid, but you have no idea, absolutely _no_ idea, how lucky you are to have one," you whisper softly, just letting the shards of your shattered heart glint on your face for a moment; and the pain of the wound inside your chest seeps into your voice, so apparent and obvious, that anyone can tell.

And maybe it's that same emotion that haltingly brings the boy to look at you. He stares at you quietly, intensely, and you stare back at him in matching silence.

Then you make the first movement, pulling back from him and sighing, reaching your hand into your jeans' pocket. The boy watches wordlessly, an expression of curiosity on his face. You take out your wallet, and you slowly open it.

Revealing the picture of a young man with dark, chestnut-brown hair, the bangs on his forehead swept on both sides, and with big, doe hazel eyes and a small smile that looks forced but still shows the inch-deep dimples on his tan cheeks.

"This..." you trail off as your voice gets caught, but then you swallow down the emotion squeezing your throat, tears pricking and blurring at the corners of your eyes. You clear your throat roughly and try again. "This is my little brother," you tell the boy softly, a fond smile gracing your lips, your eyes and your voice filled with absolute love and adoration for that innocent, puppy-eyed kid in the picture, along with anguish, grief and regret on the edges of your tone.

"Where — where is he?" the boy asks hesitantly.

"He, uh — " you pause for a split second, biting your lower lip and closing your eyes against the oncoming tears burning underneath your eyelids. You duck your head down and inhale a deep breath, and exhale, and you try again. "He died. Five months ago," you answer silently, sniffing inaudibly at the sudden clogging inside your nose, trying not to let those words of painful loss overcome you. The boy takes the wallet from you and gazes at the man in the picture. You turn your head towards the front and lean forward, resting your elbows on your lap, staring ahead at the empty space on the grass.

You swallow against the lump that's getting bigger and bigger inside of your throat, trying to ignore the large hew of loneliness and the darkness growing inside your chest, reopening a deep gouge there, twisting your heart painfully. You sigh deeply, your gaze fixated on a particular spot of forage. "See, my brother — he — he did something. I'm not gonna tell you what he did, but I will tell you that — I held that grudge against him — for _ten_ years," you tell him, trying to hold back the sorrow, the remorse and the anguish that's struggling to burst out of your eyes and into your voice. "I held that grudge against him for _ten_ years," you repeat softly, as if confessing a huge crime guiltily ( _which is probably what it is_ ), your voice is nothing above a soft, pained whisper, because you know if you say it out loud, your voice will break.

"I hated him — what he did, I hated him so much — Or maybe I just tried to," you laugh mirthlessly, filled with nothing but unadulterated sadness, tears on the edges of your eyes, but you know the kid can't see them, your head is ducked down. You swallow again and continue. "Turns out I couldn't. No matter how hard I tried to, I couldn't." You smile softly, talking as if nobody's really hearing you. "He — he was my brother, my baby brother. And I realized that after I lost him."

Silence fills between you and him, the only sounds are of children laughing happily in the background, but then it's broken by the person sitting beside you.

"What happened to him?" the boy asks curiously.

You don't want to share the rest, you really don't want to tell him anything more than you already did.

But then you lift your head up and you see the younger brother sitting alone on the bench, and it may be on the other side of the park and his head is ducked down, but you can still see the shaking of his small, thin shoulders, little drops of salty tears falling down from his eyes and soaking on his jeans.

You decide right then and there, that you're going to fix the relationship between these two brothers.

Because you never did the same with your own brother.


	2. Chapter 2

**May, 1995**

 

You stand there, watching the flames burn your father's corpse away into ashes. The tears are streaming down your face, but you don't notice them as the weight of grief pushes you to your knees, and you stare and stare and stare until the fire is gone, leaving behind smoke and the feeling of finality that whispers you'll never see him again.

You look over at your younger brother, who stares blankly at the pyre, not a tear in his eye.

 

**...**

 

**July, 1995**

 

The demon smiles at you, arrogant and snide, as you begin the exorcism.

" _Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus..._ "

"I'll say hello to your father down there," the demon says cockily, bloody teeth flashing at you in a half-snarl and a half-smile.

You hesitate at that, for a moment, before continuing.

The vessel of the demon's features twist in pain as he writhes slightly on the chair. "Your... your daddy was a... v-very, very bad... man, Deano," the demon gasps out between harsh pants, grinning widely. "And now... he's being... p-punished."

"My father was a good man, you bastard!" you yell as anger flares up in your chest, cutting off the exorcism. You can feel Bobby's eyes boring into the back of your head.

You put your hands on the arms of the chair, gripping it hard as you lean forward, looking it right in the eye. "And he's not in Hell, so you can cut the crap before I make your last moments on Earth even more miserable than it needs to be." Your voice is a menacing hiss, an enraged sneer twisting your features.

The demon sucks in a deep breath, trying to push down the last dredges of his pain caused by the exorcism. "You want... want to know how he died?" The demon grins again, almost maniacally, and its eyes swivel to your right. "You want to know who... who killed him?"

You follow its gaze, and you find your twelve-year old brother standing there, his face vacant as he stares down at his feet.

"Tell me, did... did you ask little Sammy what happened?" it questions, smirking as it stares at your little brother. "Did he tell you anything?"

You don't say anything. But the demon sees the answer on your face anyway. You _have_ asked him, so many times, but he never said a word ever since your father died.

"Tell me, did he... did he cry even a little at your daddy's funeral?" it continues, and chuckles again. "Even just a tear?"

"Whatever the hell you wanna say, jackass, you might as well say it now. 'Cause you sure as hell won't be getting any other chance," you snarl, narrowing your eyes into a heated glare.

The demon stares at you, returning the gaze, as the smirk plasters back on its face, and it tilts its head. "I know things... so many things," it tells you, and then glances at Sam. "And I know that your darling little Sammy was the one who killed your father." It laughs. "Oh, Lucifer. Doesn't that sound like something taken straight out of an overdramatic novel!"

The demon then stops and stares at you in puzzlement as you snort at him, smirking and looking away as you shake your head disbelievingly.

"You really think I'll believe that?" you say, pure skepticism mixed in with snark in your voice.

"Why don't you ask him then?" the demon replies knowingly in return, seeming certain in its belief, no longer finding anything humorous, but simply as if it's a game to see who's right and who's wrong. Its eyes narrow in challenge, staring at you as it lifts its chin.

"I don't have to," you sneer. "I know you're lying."

"Do you?" it challenges again. "Do you _really_ know that?"

"Yes, asshole. I _really_ do," you answer, sarcasm oozing out of your voice.

And then you step back, the demon's gaze fixed on you, and you begin to chant the exorcism.

 

**...**

 

"How stupid did it think I was?" you question incredulously, furiously, looking at Bobby as you make your way over to the vehicle. "I mean, why would it even think that I'd believe something like that?

"God knows," Bobby replies, shrugging.

"Sammy would never do that," you continue, feeling the flames of disgust and fury burn even more inside you at the demon and its words. "The kid doesn't even have it in him to hurt a fly. Let alone _his own goddamn fathe_ r!"

"Forget about what that damn thing said, alright kid?" Bobby says. "It's dead. And we both know it was lying. That's all we need."

You inhale a large breath, and give him an agreeable nod, and then you glance back at your kid brother trailing silently behind you, his gaze fixed on the ground.

The words of the demon follow you into the night no matter how hard you try to forget them.

 

**...**

 

It happens again, three weeks later. Right when the memories of that demon almost faded away completely.

"Sammy killed your daddy," the demon hisses, and smiles even as its skin sizzles with the holy water you've thrown at it. "Your daddy spilled it out himself. Master told me. Master was right there when he said it."

"Your friend told me the same lies weeks ago," you say to it, a snarl curling your lips upward, your eyes narrowed into a glare. Your hands land on the arms of the chair, and you lean forward, right into its face, just like with that demon before. "And I sent him to Hell."

" _Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus..._ "

The words haunt your mind once again.

 

**...**

 

You've hunted four demons in three months.

And the fifth one says the same things the other four did.

_Your papa's in hell with us._

_Sammy killed your father._

_Your daddy told us that himself._

"Goddamnit, stop fucking lying!" Your hands wrap around the demon's throat tightly as you scream, and it's all you want to do right now. You just want to scream because _it just can't be fucking true_. "Shut up! Just shut the hell up!"

Bobby's trying to pull you away from it, and the demon gasps out a laugh just as your hands let go. "Sammy killed...your papa, Dean," the demon pants between intakes of air, repeating the same words that have been in your head for months. "And it's the truth. I promise you, it's the truth. Your daddy said it himself."

"Your promises mean nothing to me, douchebag," you growl.

Then the demon turns its head to Sammy, grinning viciously with a manic look in its eyes. "Go on, Sammy. Tell him. Tell big brother how you held that gun in that motel room, when big brother was away at Uncle Bobby's to hunt. Tell him how you aimed it at Johnny's head. Tell him how you _shot_ him."

You lunge towards it, but Bobby's arms are still restraining you. "Goddamnit, you son of a bitch!" you yell, trying to fight your surrogate father's strong grip on you as you writhe and struggle.

"Tell him about the guilt you're feeling now as you listen to me..." the demon whispers, tilting its head. "I can sense it all the way here."

"Sam, tell him he's wrong! Tell him what a fucking liar he is!" you beg Sammy desperately. Sammy hasn't said a word in all these months Dad's been gone, but you need him to speak now. You need him to tell that demon (tell _you_ ) that what it's saying isn't true. "Sammy, come on. Please!"

For the first time in six months, Sammy talks.

And breaks you into pieces in only two, quiet words.

"It's true."

 

**...**

 

There's cold emptiness inside your chest as you walk out, questions and wonders and reasons (there _has_ to be an reason why) whirring through your mind. Your features are smooth and hard with impassiveness, your green eyes vacant of any emotion.

"Was he possessed?" you ask him quietly, your ears craving to hear a 'yes', your burning heart begging the kid to affirm (because maybe it'd be enough to make you forgive him).

Sam doesn't say anything, just locks his gaze on the floor and then shakes his head, and your chest heats up with anger.

"Were _you_ possessed?"

Sam inhales softly, and tentatively shakes his head.

The anger explodes into full-out rage as you storm forward and grab his shoulders in a harsh, bruising grip and scream furiously in his face, "Then what. The _hell. HAPPENED?!_ "

And then you want to yell some more when his face crumples and he croaks out a quiet, broken, "I'm sorry."

You stare at him hard, your eyes ablaze and your jaw set, as the rage scorches your veins and your heaving chest and your entire being and the urge to just _goddamn pummel something_ nearly consumes you.

And you shove him away from yourself, and he falls to the ground with a surprised and pained gasp.

You spin away from him, clutching at your hair as your face scrunches up tightly as the rage becomes too much and you don't know what to do _what to fucking do_ anymore with yourself and with this situation and the helplessness and melancholy and confusion and betrayal and the rage that makes you want to scream and cry and punch something until you could maybe... maybe... maybe _what_?

There's no escape from this, no escape out of this. There's no escape, and you don't know what to do and how to get all of this out of you and how to just make it all _stop_ because it feels like no matter what you would do, it won't ever go away and it feels too _horrible_.

You want to hurt him. You want to hurt him so bad and so much and you want to forgive him but you think about him being the one who killed your dad and your heart feels too hollow and you know you just _can't_. You know you can't. And you know you never will. Not for this. Never for this.

"What could _possibly_..." you force out, your voice tight and shaky as you turn back to him, your hands still in your hair and your mouth twisted up hard and your narrowed eyes shining with more tears, your flushed cheeks wet. "have happened for you to... to have to _kill_ him?" you ask, your voice low and tight and agonized as you stare at him through slit, sparkling orbs, your brows pinched with hurt and grief and fury.

Sam doesn't reply, his shoulders shaking with restrained cries as his hands curl into fists on his lap.

" _TELL ME!_ " you roar, loud and furious and desperate for an answer (a reason that didn't have to make you hate him).

Bobby comes out of the building after exorcising the demon and disposing the body. But you don't notice. All you notice is the desperation and anguish and rage roasting away at your sanity and the little strength you still had left after your father was gone, and all you notice are the echoes of all those demons' words filling up your mind and swallowing whole everything that you knew until there's nothing left but _Sammy killed your daddy Sammy killed your daddy Sammy killed your daddy_.

Sam remains silent, his tears dripping down on his jeans and hands, and the silence angers you even more than any words could.

And the next thing you know, one of your fists are in his collar and the other is hauled back, all your emotions channeled into this one arm, and ready to hurl it into his cheek.

But then Bobby's there, tugging you away from the person who killed your hero, and you're on your knees and crying so hard and you can't stop and it feels like no matter how much you sob from your very soul and how many tears you shed and how hard your faces crumples _it's never enough_. It's never enough, and the agony shredding your heart apart never goes away.

 

**...**

 

After you pull yourself together, Bobby lets go of you. Sam's still sitting exactly where he was, except his restraint has broken and now he's crying openly. There are tears down his face despite all his attempts to hold them back, gasping sobs ripping out of him forcefully as he pressed a fist against his mouth to muffle them and strangled whimpers escaping his throat and —

And you feel nothing.

You feel nothing for him. And it feels as if all the love you had for him has been sucked out of you, leaving nothing but cold emptiness as well as burning hate.

And you know that you'll never forgive him for what he did.

And you know you'll never be able to see him as your little brother again.


	3. Chapter 3

**October 1995**

 

"...can tell me anything, boy," you hear Bobby's voice through the door, muffled and low, and your steps halt before you could pass by the library and to the other side. "There's a reason. I _know_ there is. And I want to know what it is." And you know who he was talking to.

His voice sounds desperate, searching for answers beneath all the confusion.

You want to know the reason too.

You want to know why. Why would he kill your father? _His_ father?

The inside of you feels sick with betrayal and loss and devastation once more (as it had been for the past week), nearly overwhelming your senses. With these emotions comes the memories of all those demons that you defended your brother from, only for it all to end in fucking _it's true_.

And with these memories returns that anger and hate, burning in this deep, unreachable center of your chest and coursing through your blood, along with the sorrow and despair nesting somewhere deep inside of you, inside your very core, and it weighs you down still (like it had weighed you down for the last ten days, settled into your bones like a disease until you couldn't do anything but sink into your bed and stare at the ceiling and try not to cry but end up crying anyway because _why_?)

(Because out of all the ways you had thought and feared you'd lose your dad, it was never _this_. Out of all the monsters you had ever imagined would kill him, it was never supposed to be your own brother.)

Sam whispers something that you can't hear from your place, so you can only fill in the gaps from Bobby's next response.

"Don't lie to me, boy," Bobby says breathily, still in that soft, desperate tone. "The Sam I know would never do something like that. Not for no reason."

There's a swift rustle, like the sound of someone standing up from their seats quickly and angrily. "Alright, you want to know why, Bobby? I _hated_ him. I hated him and _that_ was the only reason."

The next thing you know is that burning anger erupting into something beyond describable. It's overpowering. Consuming. Encompassing. Devouring. Devouring all your senses and awareness. Because you never knew when you barged through that door, some tiny, nearly unnoticeable part of you subconsciously registering the hard explosive sound as you did so, and towards the monster who killed your father, screaming savage words that don't really reach your own mind. All you know is that there was no fucking reason for what he did other than the fact that he _hated him_ and how could that just be fucking _it_?

It shatters that small part of you, somewhere in the back, waiting and hoping for answers that would explain his actions. For reasons.

But now.

Now, nothing matters. Now you know that even if there _was_ another reason, it would have never been enough.

He murdered your hero, and that was unforgivable.

 

**...**

 

Bobby drags you out of the room, away from _him_ , right after you got a hit in. It doesn't feel better in the least. The flames inside you, the loathing and fury, never dissipate, and you wish more than anything that they would but you don't know how to make them leave you. You wish more than anything that all of this wasn't real, just a horrible nightmare; that that boy in there was still your baby brother and not the bastard whose hands were red with your father's blood.

But he was. He was and this is your reality now. Your dark, confusing, fucked-up reality.

"Dean, I get that you're pissed right now," Bobby says to you, in this reasonable and logical tone, but reasons mean nothing and nothing makes sense anyway, so what's the point? "But hitting your brother - "

"He's not my brother!" you scream at him, before your mind even catches up with your mouth, and you hurl yourself away from him, your back colliding against the wall behind you as hard breaths rip out of you as you hold in your sobs and try not to cry again. God, you were so fucking tired of crying. "Don't call him that. D- don't..." Your voice stutters and cracks, and you can't bring yourself to care that you're about to break down right in front of an audience. "Don't ever call him my brother again. He's not my brother anymore."

Your eyes catch _his_ behind Bobby, his hand on his cheek and his wide eyes wet as he stares at you, wounded and dejected.

And you feel another flare of smoldering heat in your chest, because he has _no_ fucking _right_ to look at you in that way. Not after what he did.

"I hate him," you whisper through clenched teeth, snarling, right as you glare back into his broken eyes.

And you mean it. You mean it more than you thought you ever would.

And some part of you aches, knowing that just about ten days ago, you never would have even thought you _could_.

 

**...**

 

**February 1997**

 

"What are you doing here, son?" Bobby's voice pipes up from behind you.

Your hand's on the doorknob, your duffel bag slung over your shoulder full of all your supplies and belongings. You're eighteen now, legally an adult, and the only reason you ever stayed these past two years was because of Bobby. Because you were still young and you needed a father and he needed you to stay.

But now you're older and all you need is to get away from _him_. From the suffocating weight of betrayal you feel every time you see him. He stays away from you mostly, but it's not enough. You need to get _away_ from him. Put miles and miles between you and him until maybe you could forget that he ever existed in your life, that there was ever a Sammy you loved more than anything who turned into a stranger (murderer) that you can't even bear the sight of because every time you look at him, all you can see is a bullet hole in your father's head; standing in front of his burning body as he reduces to ashes, asking yourself and your brother over and over that _who did this, damn it?_

And never knowing that the person was right there in front of you.

"I'm leaving," you answer simply, bluntly. It should have been obvious anyway.

"Yeah? And just where will you be going, exactly?"

"Pastor Jim. Caleb. I don't know. I haven't decided," you say, shrugging carelessly.

"And what? You were just gonna go without tellin' me?"

"I don't have to. I'm eighteen now."

"I don't give a crap about how old you are, boy," Bobby says, nearly hissing, anger seeping into his voice. "Ya should have let me know you were leavin'."

You sigh heavily and turn around on your heel. "Fine. I'm leaving, Bobby. Now you know," you retort, raising your arms wide as you smile sarcastically.

Bobby stays silent for a while. Seconds tick by as you stand facing him, staring at him as he stares back at you.

"Is it 'cause of Sam?" then he asks softly.

You remain silent for a moment.

You look away and snort mirthlessly. "Why else could it be?"

"You don't have to do this, kid," he whispers, gazing at you through desperate eyes. "We can figure this out. There's a reason why he did what he did. I know there is."

"Yeah, you keep telling yourself that," you mutter, without really thinking. But it's the same thing that goes through your mind every time he says it.

Then Bobby's eyes narrow into a glare, locked right into your own, and he steps forward. "Say that again," he dares.

You hold his gaze, firm and steady and just as daring. " _You_ keep telling yourself that," you repeat lowly, and your eyes slit and hard and challenging as your nostrils flare. "And someday, when you realize that there wasn't any reason at all..."

"You don't _know_ anything, boy," Bobby sneers.

"I _know…_ that whatever the fucking _reason_ was," you spit, a mocking emphasis on the word 'reason', as you return his glare and step closer, towering over him. "That bastard _never_ should have killed him."

"Watch your tongue, or I'll - "

"He _killed_ my _dad_ , Bobby!" you yell, a mixture of rage and hurt burning your chest and stomach and making your insides sick. "Does that even matter to you? Do you even care about what he did... did to _me_? Or do you just care about finding a reason that's probably _not even there_?!"

"I'm trying ta' find it out for you, damn it!" Bobby screams back.

"And I _don't_ fucking _care_ , okay?!" you bellow, loud and furious and frustrated. "I don't care! So stop looking for it, because whatever it is, I don't. _Care_! I don't care if he was possessed or if it wasn't of his own will or if he didn't have a goddamn choice! He _never_ should have done what he did!"

"And what if the only other choice for him was ta' die?!"

" _Then he should have died!_ "

It was angry and thoughtless and quick and it sends the entire room into silence, the heavy pants the only sounds between you and him. And Bobby's staring at you, eyes wide and furrowed with horror and confusion, and your own eyes are large and hardened and more than a little wild with rage, your jaw clenched and your features twisted into a snarl, and the silence remains, stretching on through long seconds.

And then a strangled sob.

It's muffled and anguished and broken. It isn't Bobby and it isn't you. And it's coming from behind the wall.

And when your gaze shifts to that direction, you see him. Half of him. Hiding beside the door on the other side, his eyes full and shining under the light with tears, and the fraction of his shoulder that you could see trembles. His one hand's clamped over his mouth to curb his cries while the other is braced against the doorway to hold himself up, and you can tell that it's the only thing keeping him on his feet.

You say nothing more. You meet Bobby's eyes one last time, horrified and angry. And you turn around and you open that door.

And you walk out and never look back, even as the gutted sobs echo from behind you.

 

**...**

 

Your heart drives you to Pastor Jim's place, and in a drive of five and a half hours, you manage to reach there in four, the emotions consuming your insides fueling you to press harder on the pedal and move faster. The loneliness and the hopelessness carving out a dark, voidless hollow in your chest, the overwhelming devastation and betrayal exploding bouts of agony deep in the loaded cavities beneath your heart, the burning rage (the never-ending rage that you're so tired of holding in your veins and chest); all of them tightening your gut until you feel sick and your face can't stop from crumpling and your throat burns and feels as weighed as your weary bones and the tears are rushing out and blurring your vision of the endless road nearing the church far in the distance (the car doesn't seem to move fast enough), even more so than the foggy raindrops on your windshield, and you don't bother to turn the wipers on, and maybe it's a good thing that the road is straight and empty.

Maybe it's not.

Maybe you just _want_ to drive into a tree or a truck or maybe past the church until you can find a cliff to jump off of.

Maybe that would make it all stop.

But you pull up outside the church, and hope that maybe somebody would understand how much it hurts.

You feel exhausted, and like a mindless zombie, you find yourself out of the car and walking through the rain before you even realize it. It's not a good idea, because it only serves to weigh your body down even more than it already is, the wet clothes growing too heavy on your already heavy bones (you feel so old) and clinging to your skin uncomfortably. You feel like maybe if you take one more step, you'd crumple to the ground. On your knees. Too burdened by the world of anguish on your bowed shoulders and the load of something unfathomable (everything in your senseless life) on your chest and the rain pounding you down and your own fucking clothes gravitating you to the mud and dirt (isn't that so ironic? How perfectly accurate it is with how you feel?), but by some miracle, you stay on your feet and walk without falling.

The air changes as you push the doors open slowly with one shaking hand and enter the church, the warmth of the water gone from your skin and the cold all the more prominent as your hairs raise and you shiver, your breaths shuddering through your nose and clenched teeth and the heavy wetness on your clothes a little more uncomfortable and strange without the melding scenery of hammering rain. The water drops and tears on your face have long been indistinguishable, but the redness in your eyes is an unmistakable sign.

Because as soon as Pastor Jim looks up and sees you, he doesn't say a word. He quietly puts down the book he's reading, and slowly makes his way towards you until he's standing right in front of you, and then he's tugging you into his arms and you don't even care that you're clutching back at him too hard and that you're not even _trying_ not to sob into his shoulder (the sounds you make takes you back to _him_ just before you walked out of that door). It's not like it would matter anyway. They'd win out in the end, and you know because you've tried before when you were so sick and tired of crying and you wanted to stop (but you never could).

Pastor Jim knows about Dad, maybe even about _who_ did it. You wouldn't know. You left as soon as the words ' _John's dead_ ' escaped Bobby's lips and into the phone.

And in that moment, it all comes back fully (sometimes you can just forget that it really hurts _so fucking much_ ), crashing and sudden and too real and painfully deep like a knife buried in your middle to the hilt, as it often does in these spurts of minutes that feel like they'll last forever (but only ever do until you wake up the next morning and _forget_ how much it really hurts and you just want the next morning to come already), and it pushes you to your knees (and you might have curled up on the floor if you didn't have someone holding you together); the knowledge that would remain within you forever, that the person who was once everything to you, who had held your entire world in his hands before, was the one who destroyed it to bits in the end. The bottomless despair of knowing you'll never see your father again, never touch him and talk to him fills you up until you think you might break apart or explode from all the agony inside, the loss and grief that made a pit into your very core and eats away at you from the inside out every day (but that wasn't even all of the pain), and you think you might be dying because there's so much _pain_ shredding you into pieces on the inside and you can't even _breathe_ properly through the hard, gasping sobs anymore.

And that doesn't even scare you. It only gives you hope, for this one insane moment where you think you might actually be going away.

"It's going to be okay, my son," Pastor Jim whispers, and they're the last words you hear before you let yourself go into the merciful darkness.

And the last thought you have is the hope that maybe it'll all finally be over.


	4. Chapter 4

**August, 1997**

 

You don't smile at strangers or pretty girls anymore, don't try to bury your pain in cocky smiles and charming grins that seem only just a little strained. It feels like too much effort for the heavy skin and tired muscles on your face anyway, and it feels so fake and wrong that it throbs your jaws and cheeks when you try.

Instead, you go on hunts and fix cars at a nearby garage, almost ten minutes away from the church. Some days you try to lose yourself in the clinks of metal and the loaded, rusty weight of twisting wrenches and the fresh shine of brand new parts, in the soreness of bones in your fingers and your wrists and the muscles of your arms. You do it until you forget that there is anything outside of the bottom of a car, until you forget that there's a world outside that exists where there's a Sam who you once called Sammy, and that he is the same boy who shot your dad in the head.

In the weekends, you hide behind the blood splattering all over you and the cuts and bruises on your flesh, and you do it until you forget that you can feel more than the smooth slice of bone and flesh and the jerk of a gun that stays steady in your hands (forget that you can feel knives and bullets in your own heart and lungs). At night, you focus on it all, the wounds from the hunts and the aches in your metallic-scented hands, to help you not think and sleep.

Some nights, the worst ones, you hide at the bottom of a whiskey bottle that you still feel too young for, and you think, with a bitter, sad smile, like father, like son. And you think, I miss him. And you pretend that your hazy, confused, cluttered mind is not half-imagining your father and half-imagining a brown-haired boy with big hazel eyes and a dimpled smile and a gun in his hands and firing it at –

You miss Bobby too. You miss Bobby so much. He was the father you didn't have to fight to gain the approval and love and pride of, because he already gave it to you freely. He was the father who filled the void that was there even when your real father was around, and he still filled some of it when he wasn't, and you feel like you are betraying your real father's memory by thinking these things, but you are drunk and sad and, even after two years since then, don't know what you are thinking or feeling or doing.

But Bobby had made you stay with _him_ , had trusted him more than he cared about you, and then you feel angry at him, and then you feel alone. You throw the whiskey bottle against the ground, watch the shards scatter around, glinting in the dim bulb lights, and remember you are in a bar that you got through with a fake ID that proves you are older than you really are, full of fifty other people that are now staring at you, and you don't feel capable of stringing two words together without becoming as broken as the whiskey bottle on the ground, so you leave your money on the counter and stumble out.

Time is just blurring by in a daze, and you can't even remember yesterday, or the last hour. The colors feel dull around you, somehow detached and illusory, and it feels like nothing was ever real. Everything that happened wasn't real.

But it was, and it's why you're standing here with alcohol in your system and stones in your chest.

You stop and lean against the car (your father's car, the shadows of him still in the driver's seat, and you let these memories fill you up with his rough whiskey and gunpowder scent and a gruff voice with firm hands on the wheel and his music blasting into your ears, but you liked to hum along to them and you liked to sit beside him and observe him so that you could be just like him when you'd be older). You stare out at the open road ahead, and you want to drive until you get lost somewhere in the world and you want to run away from all of it, and for a few seconds, in your drunken, alcohol-fuzzed mind, you think that if you run far enough and long enough, you could outrun it all; the memories that don't feel like yours and the truth that surrounds your world with a gray-hued desolation. But then you realize that you can't, because it's all inside of you, and you'll only carry it with you forever, wherever you go, and you feel trapped in your own skin, with your distant mind and your hollow, aching heart.

You think about those two years in that house, and they feel short, rushing by you like cars on the street. But that doesn't seem right, because you know that you were there, and you felt like all the moments were just dragging on and on and on, not really going anywhere (maybe time passes oddly when you're living purposelessly, not sure where you're going, not sure where you want to go. Not sure if you want to go anywhere at all). You couldn't even breathe in some of them.

You spent two years in that house, with him between the same walls as you, and you saw his face every day at the table until he started to eat in the room, saw him only at night when you had to share a room with him for a bed. After a while, he became nothing more than a silent presence, without any sound, without any proof that he was even there. He had treaded around like a ghost, like he was trying to make you forget that he existed, and that was good, because maybe you wanted that too.

And now that it's been months since you've been here, with miles and miles between you and him, you think that you could almost pretend like he doesn't, because then you could pretend that none of what had happened two years ago was real.

But your father is still dead, and the memories of _him_ still nag at you, and it becomes one more thing to try and forget.

 

**…**

 

**December 2001**

 

You're on a hunt in Sioux Falls (you don't know why you chose this one out of all the other ones) when a werewolf jumps on you and slashes your stomach, deep and wide.

And you shove the barrel of your gun right into its chest and pull the trigger, silver bullet piercing through its body and snapping into the tree behind it.

There's blood spattered all over your face and teeth and clothes, one dead werewolf beside you, and you're thinking about just staying there, just closing your eyes and letting things be the way they are right now. You, on the ground, bleeding out. Not moving. Dying.

For some reason, you haul yourself off the ground and get in the car and drive to Bobby's house instead.

You're trying not to think about seeing _him_ (you still don't know what to call him now, something that doesn't make you feel like you're personalizing him, making him real and sentient and existent) again, and you're trying not to hate him and trying not to wonder what he looks like now, five years later, and whether he's in college or stuck to hunting, and whether he's happy or still as sad and gutted as the day you left him (you're trying to hope it's the latter). You're thinking about Bobby, and whether he regrets that fight last time like you do. You're thinking about how nice it'll be to see him again, talk to him. You're wondering if he'll think the same too.

Your head's a little light and clouded, which means you're losing blood. If that is not what will kill you, then the car swerving into a house or tree is what might. That wouldn't be so bad.

You park outside that familiar house that you haven't seen in too long. There's something warm, and something heavy inside of you, at the sight of it.

You open the door and fall out of the car onto your knees, blood soaking wet and sticky on your shirt and hand. You push yourself up with the other hand by the support of your car, stumble forward, trying not to lose balance again.

And then you find yourself at the door, beating a fist at the door with the remnants of your strength.

You pass out just as it opens.

 

**...**

 

You float in the space between sleep and consciousness. There are voices, then sensations (something soft under you, something warm on your hand), and then vision.

You open your eyes, and the first thing you see is _him_.

He's still young, still thin and innocent and baby-faced. His eyes are still the hazel you remember, his hair still the brown of chocolate and chestnut. Sloped nose and fox-slanted eyes and dimples that you only see glimpses of with every movement of his face. But he's taller, older, and you almost don't recognize him.

You're still floating in that space in-between. He smiles hesitantly at you (a little flicker, just a glimpse of dimples) and you feel a sharp twist in your heart, and you almost let yourself think that it's love (later, you will deny that you almost smiled back).

But then full awareness snaps back in. You jerk your hand away from his, glare at him, allow that hollow burn of stale rage and hatred to come forward (take you away from the shame of whatever you felt in the delirium of the limbo between dreams and reality).

"Don't fucking touch me."

So he backs away, taken aback as if he had expected everything to be forgotten. Fine and dandy.

And then he looks broken, eyes going red and teary and heavy, mouth tight so that it doesn't crumple up. He glances up from his shoes and at Bobby, who comes over and crouches beside you, and he slips away from your side (you're ignoring that pang of loss as he does). Your gaze is rooted firmly on Bobby after that, never let it stray to over his right shoulder.

"How you feeling, boy?"

Bobby sounds concerned, and you realize that you have missed that genuine worry so much, have missed him, and you're choking back tears behind a tight smile and a, "I'm good, Bobby. You?"

"I've been growing gray hairs worrying out of my mind for ya these past years, boy, and then ye show up at my door with only half ye blood in yer body. How d'ya think? You've been out for two days! What the hell were ya thinkin', boy?" Bobby scolds you, sounds so much like a father that your heart explodes in a brief bout of agony at the thought, trying to remember when your real father had ever sounded like that since the day your mom died. You can't. You still wish he was here with you.

"Yeah, I... I got a little reckless. It was stupid, and I'm sorry," you say, swallowing down a myriad of emotions trying to shove its way out of you. "Thanks."

"Don't thank me. Thank yer brother," Bobby said, jerking his head over to _him_. That's when you finally give in to the nagging urge trying to tug your eyes to him, finally look at him.

 _Brother_.

Brother was a word you haven't thought of in a long while. Or at least, never completely. Always caught yourself before you could voice it in words inside your head, because that isn't what he is anymore to you. You don't know what to call him, but you're sure that brother would probably be the last thing on the list.

"Don't call him that."

"What'd ya say?"

"Don't call him that. Brother." You wanted to sound strong and angry, but it just comes out breathlessly tired. "He ain't that to me anymore. Not since he shot my Dad."

For some reason, _he_ doesn't cry like you expect him to (maybe because he's not the child that you had left that day anymore). He keeps his eyes on you, and though they're still broken and heavy, they're also suddenly numb. As if the mention of your father made his soul stop working. You don't know if it's because it hurts him too much, or if it's because he just doesn't care. But you notice, and there's something about that look in his eyes that tells a foreign story, sings a tune that's not the same as the one you've known all these years.

You mentally shake that thought away and look up at Bobby. He's not angry, like he was when you were both fighting the day when you left, but sad. Tired. Maybe he had finally realized, somewhere during your absence, that there really was no reason at all.

 

**…**

 

The week that follows is full of awkward encounters with a brown-haired boy (with bloody hands and pathetic eyes) constantly passing you by, on the way to the bathroom, in or out the kitchen, to pick up books from the library (where you sleep now on the couch, because you can't walk upstairs to the room, where _he_ sleeps and where Bobby would have made you sleep too if you could, so you're okay with this).

It's surreal to see him again, you think. After all that time spent pretending (trying to) to ignore his existence. He never meets your eyes, always down at his feet like he's hoping that if he wouldn't see you, then you wouldn't see him. _Like a child_ , you scoff irately to yourself. Today, he didn't sit at the table for breakfast or lunch or dinner, didn't come down to the library to read a book. He has been locked up in his room (the one that was once for guests but has become his now) all day, becoming that same ghost five years ago. Good. Let him be invisible and undisruptive. You like it better that way.

"He never lets me remove that second bed," Bobby says suddenly. You look at him, where he's leaning against the counter, takes you a second or two to understand what he means. You don't know what he wants from you when he tells you this or how he's expecting you to react, if he thinks you'll be touched or saddened or if it'll make you want to hold _his_ hand and tell him you forgave him or god-knows-what. But whatever it is that he's hoping for, he'll be sorely disappointed.

"He's just wasting space then," you reply, make it clear that it doesn't matter to you. You look away to the beer bottle twirling between your fingers when you see Bobby's face grow ages older with weariness, and your stomach weighs down a hundred pounds with guilt, but you don't try to make up for it.

Bobby rubs a hand down his face, sighs quietly as you see him stare at you sadly in the corner of your eye, and you pretend not to notice the way you've been pretending not to notice a lot of things all these years (one of these things is a dreadful betrayal, sinful to the memories of your father, and you will not know that it's there until later, much too later).

 

**…**

 

Two weeks later (you've stuck around for Bobby because he asked you to and being away from him was not as easy as you wished it had been these past five years, and you think you owe him for his unapologetic forgiveness as soon as you came to his door), on a Thursday, land on the day you turn twenty-three years old. Bobby brings pie instead of cake from a bakery nearby, small candles haphazardly stuck on top of it, and gives you a small pocket-knife with your father's initials engraved in it as well as your own, just below it. You can't explain why, but it makes you happy for the first time in too long.

 _He_ never shows up today either, and save for a few accidental run-ins the past weeks, you have barely seen him (this is good. This is good, you think to yourself). Bobby gets sick and tired of this and drags him downstairs into the kitchen that evening, and you stand up and leave the room as soon as they appear. Your wound has healed half-way through, and it's not as impossible to limp upstairs anymore, and so you limp upstairs because you can't stand the thought of being in the same floor as him for too long, where you can find him too easily (not that being in the same house helps matters). You make it all the way up, and you go into the only room there is, which happens to be _his_ room.

The room is bare, absolutely undecorated, almost like he's only been living here as a necessity, as a guest. True to Bobby's word, there are still two beds, the one closest to the wall used (small wrinkles here and there) but made tidily enough, even if a bit half-heartedly, and the one closest to the door (the one you had always slept in) completely straight and untouched. You wonder, almost without thinking, if he changes the sheets for this one too or whether it's still the same as the one you had slept on the last night you stayed here. You wonder why you're wondering these things. It doesn't really matter.

There are drawers, a chair placed in front of a desk. There was a lamplight on it, papers strewn all over, a few books piled messily on top of each other, and lastly, a small package which, you are surprised to see, has your name on it. _Dean_. It is imprecisely wrapped in newspaper, eroded and wrinkled from time, with the frayed tape on the fold only just holding it together, ready to wear off with the slightest disturbance. It brings memories of what once was, memories that only serve to make your heart as heavy as if it's filled with water all of a sudden. You shake those memories off your mind, and your feet moves toward it of its own accord, and somehow, you think you already know what is in there. Your fingers reach up to your chest, where it meets flesh instead of solid (suddenly too light and empty without the weight of a golden horned talisman).

You had thrown it away three weeks after that day (because that was when clarity had settled in, when the fog of confusion and denial and desperate excuses had cleared away, when you had realized, for real, that this was where you couldn't look at him and the world the same way again), right in front of him, right when he was there and he was watching it dangle from the last joints of your fingers. You had let it drop into the bin and you had never looked back.

It is not meant to be given, the way it's hidden away in the room, old and shabby and yellowed from years and years of being unopened. You don't know why you want to take it out and touch it and pocket it away.

You throw it in the bin instead.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: mentions of attempted suicide in this chapter.

There comes a day when it becomes too much, to be staying with someone who was a walking reminder of your loss and grief, whose grown hands still make you wonder about the way they looked holding a gun at the man who taught you everything that kept you alive. You are ready to leave, to go back to that life without the boy you had once called Sammy as if he was everything to you. You pack your bags and stand at the door ready to say goodbye, and Bobby asks you if you'd like to have one last beer with him until the next time you'll meet again, but you don't tell him that maybe there won't be a next time, not with that boy around. It is this thought that takes you into the kitchen with him, for that one last beer. He gives you a bottle, and you take it and drink it as slowly as possible so that the goodbye wouldn't come too soon.

You tell him a story that happened at the garage back in Blue Earth, Minnesota about an old man who mistook you for his long-dead son. He tells you a story in return about the first time he met your father (you've heard it quite a few times, but he knows you'll never get tired of hearing it again). You're almost finished with your beer, but you don't want to say that goodbye anymore, so you ask him for another, and you talk some more, and then you ask for another again. He doesn't object. And then there's silence, long and peaceful. And then he tells you something you didn't expect to hear at all.

"I found him three times," he says. You hum questioningly, feeling the warm buzz of alcohol in your veins, feeling calm and nice.

"Found who?" you ask him, taking another mouthful.

"Sam."

The calm and niceness is suddenly gone. Your veins are suddenly cold again. And now you're finally ready to say your goodbye.

You stare at him, your eyes closed-off and hardened. He stares back at you the way he often does now, sad and weary. You don't understand what he means, and you don't ask him.

"Guess it's time for me to go now," you tell him, standing up, your beer only half-finished.

"Once with an empty bottle'a pills, once with his arms cut open, once with a gun t'his temple," he goes on anyway.

Why that stops you, you can't say.

"I know ye don' wanna hear it, son… but that ain't the actions of a boy who doesn' care. There is somethin' _wrong_ here," he nearly pleads, sounding desperate, and it would have been painful to hear that gruff voice in such a tone if it was talking about something else, but right now, you are too incensed.

You hurl your bag down, whirl around and get up right in his face. It's just like 1997, a sense of déjà vu overcoming you for a few seconds, with you and him fighting about the exact same thing, just when you're on the edge of walking out and never coming back. There's some part of you, pushed far in the back by fury, that whispers that you don't want to leave like this again, to back off and get out of this house with a clear conscience and on good terms.

But you're still snarling the words even as that whisper inside of you begs you to stop. You are no longer within your mind, but the antagonism that takes you over and forces the words out of you like a stormy sea, uncontrolled and livid. "So what exactly are you trying to say here? That somehow the killer's the innocent one and the innocent one's at fault? That my Dad deserved what he fucking got?!"

"That ain't what I'm sayin' boy, and you know that," Bobby says, but his voice is the one thing that's different from before. He is not angry, not yelling or challenging you, but soft and sorrowful and drained. "I'm sayin' maybe there's somethin' we don' know. Maybe he jus' had to."

"When will you get that it doesn't fucking matter if it was the only choice he had? Hell, he did have a choice, didn't he? He could have chosen _not to pull that fucking trigger_. Simple as that. Whatever happened after that, 'least he wouldn' have been a murderer!"

Bobby turns away half-way through your tirade, hands running up his face and clutching at his hair underneath his ball-cap, shoulders trembling slightly. You have never seen him like this, and that ignored whisper pipes up again.

He stops, takes a deep, quivering breath that makes you wonder just how much he's been suffering, caught in-between this. Searching for a reason that's not there, and trying to convince you that there is. "There's just no convincin' ya, huh boy?" he says quietly, arms coming down slowly. He turns back around, and your gut wrenches at the mournful look on his face. It pulls up into a sad smile. "Well… guess it's time for ye t'leave then. Was good havin' ya here these pas' weeks."

He embraces you at the door and pats your shoulder with a smile that tells you that he didn't like watching you leave that night after an argument and wants things to be different this time, and you walk out of there feeling like your insides are made of lead. You can't breathe from the weight of it.

Maybe it is because of this weight that you let everything happen the way it does.

You sit outside the house in your car for a long time, remembering Bobby's words and his face and his voice as he told you the things he told you, the quiet anguish that only make your insides heavier and heavier the more you think about it. The significance of what he said doesn't hit you until a while after, that he was the one who had to find _him_ on the edge of death all those times (how selfish could he be to put him through that?), be the one stuck with something he shouldn't even have to be stuck with, the collateral damage in a predicament that shouldn't be his to deal with.

You startle out of your thoughts when you hear Bobby yelling after _him_ to come back into the house. He sounds like he's expecting something terrible, and for good reason, you think, when the passenger door opens and _he_ slips in with his bag on his lap.

Bobby's still at the door, hanging out of it, watching closely and seemingly preparing himself to dislodge a bad situation.

"Get the fuck out," you snarl at him wrathfully, hostility pouring out into those four words. You realize dimly that this is the second time you've talked to him.

"No," he refuses, defiance and resolve in his voice. His tenacity surprises you briefly, becoming so used to that phantom he had become these four weeks. "You loathe me, and I get it. But I am _not_ going through that again, always worrying that you might have bit the dust by some random monster that you were stupid enough to hunt solo. You didn't even have the _decency_ to answer Bobby's calls to at least tell him you were okay. Then you changed your goddamn phone number. You haven't seen him frantically calling everyone for you those first few months after you were gone, and nobody knew where you were and if they did, they wouldn't tell—"

"You know what? How about you cut your 'I care too much' bullshit, because if you did, you _really_ would have thought twice about killing my Dad—"

"And if you cared about Bobby even a little bit, you wouldn't have left him to panic over your ass for five fucking years! At least let me come with you for Bobby, if not for me, so that I can do what you couldn't by keeping him informed that you're at least alive!"

"Oh, fuck off, you pathetic bastard—"

"Don't even think that I'm coming with you to try to gain your forgiveness somehow, because I'm _not_. I already know what I deserve, and I know that forgiveness is not it. What I did… there are no words."

"Well, I'm so fucking glad. Now his spirit can finally be at peace since you feel so _awful_ about murdering him."

He swallows, shaking his head, and he's breathing hard, looking angry and close to tears. "I'll stay away from you, okay? You won't notice me more than it's necessary. I won't do anything you don't want me to do—"

"What I _don't_ want is to sit in close quarters with you for hours at a time. Just get the fuck out before I _throw_ you out, and while the car's moving."

He takes a deep breath, and it reminds you of the way Bobby did while you were fighting minutes ago. He runs a hand over his mouth and up over his hair, and that reminds you of Bobby too. "Please…" he pleads, breathless and defeated. "I can't… I can't keep doing this anymore."

 _Once with an empty bottle'a pills, once with his arms cut open, once with a gun t'his temple_.

Bobby's suddenly standing beside you. He always looks tired these days, but he seems exhausted and aggrieved beyond anything you have ever seen on his face right now.

"Sam, come on, son," he says. "You know better."

"I'm goin' to take care of him, Bobby, so that you won't have to worry," he tells him quietly. You roll your eyes and you want to tell him that his care and concern is the last thing you want, but you don't want to see Bobby any more distressed than he already is.

"He's not gonna take ya," Bobby says softly. "He's gonna leave ya first chance he gets."

"Then I won't let him." _That isn't up to you_ , you think.

"And what're ya gonna do t'stop 'im?" he asks reasonably. You feel a flare of annoyance at the way they keep talking about you like you're not there, but you let Bobby get him off your hands.

"Whatever it takes."

You watch Bobby, the way his features sag even more at the words, and you keep thinking back to the fight, to everything he had said.

 _I found him three times_.

Maybe it's that weight of your leaded insides, the look on Bobby's face right now and the look there was when he was telling you about those three times and about the notional reason. Maybe it's because you're thinking that he doesn't deserve to be caught in-between this, that he's suffered enough because of _him_ (maybe because you keep thinking about knives and guns and empty bottle pills).

But you find yourself saying, "y'know what? I really don't give a shit anymore. Suit yourself. Don't start cryin' when you find yourself alone in some dingy motel room one morning because I'm not gonna be waiting around for someone I don't even _want_ to keep around, you get that?"

He nods in acceptance. If he's wounded by your words, there is no sign of it, but it's clear he knows that it's not an empty threat.

Bobby has an unreadable expression on his face, something of a strange mixture between hopeful surprise (you don't think about whatever it is that he's hoping for) and a doubtful fear that this isn't going to end right. It won't. You know this. But you'll let _him_ learn this the hard way. At least Bobby doesn't seem so worn-out and afflicted anymore, and that's what you're doing this for after all.

You rev the engine and raise a hand to Bobby in a wave, and he smiles at you, and small as it is, it's real. Something tells you that it doesn't come easy to him anymore, so your chest bubbles up with warmth to see it.

You feel like you're doing the right thing for one person, and the wrong thing for another (your father's body burning on a pyre haunts your mind). You feel sick to your throat with confliction and the despair of being entrapped with the apparition of your father's death. But thoughts of Bobby drift into your mind, and you realize that it's something essential for the sake of his peace, whatever bit of it is left for him. You owe him this.

 

**…**

 

You continue on the same way you have the past five years without him. You stop at a motel and get a room with a king-sized bed. He follows you closely behind (as if afraid that if he wasn't fast enough to get through the door, you'd leave him out), but not too close that he'd think it would bother you. It does bother you though. It bothers you a lot to have him there when you've gotten so used to pretending that he doesn't exist, and that's what you want to do tonight, and maybe for however long this lasts. You want to continue pretending that he is not there because doing anything more seemed too overwhelming.

For some reason though, you find yourself noticing him a lot more than you want to, the presence of a vivid awareness of him that you deny to yourself, something faint and muted almost in the back of your mind. You notice how he doesn't say anything when he sees the bed, how he just puts his duffle bag down on the furthest corner of the room, rolls up his jacket and places it on the ground as a makeshift pillow acceptingly. It makes you realize, vaguely, that he really will follow on his promise.

You go into the bathroom for a shower and walk out with your hair dripping, your clothes fresh and clean and making you feel fresh and clean. He never moves from his corner until you're in bed with your covers drawn up to your shoulders. When he does, he walks across the room swiftly and quietly, a blur zooming past like the trick of a specter, and the way he shuts the door is too careful and measured, with a hushed thud and the slowest of a click. It's almost pitiable how hard he's trying to be undetected to one person in such a small room.

You fall asleep to the sound of television noise and spraying water and wake up as sudden as a blink to more spraying water and the sunlight streaming through windows and the tempting scent of breakfast and coffee making your mouth water. There's a cup and a Styrofoam box on the night table beside your bed along with a newspaper beneath it, flipped to the page providing details of a potential case. You take the newspaper and leave the coffee and food growing cold.

He comes out of the bathroom looking like a wet dog, soaking hair hanging over his face and a towel over his shoulders. You don't look at him too long. He doesn't look at you either. Like strangers passing on the street.

But you notice the shadows sinking his eyes in, and you wonder if he didn't sleep because he didn't want to wake up to an empty motel room the next morning. And you wonder how long he'll keep staying awake at nights just to make sure it doesn't happen. And you wonder why you wonder so much about him when you'd much rather not have to think about him at all.

He gets in the car about ten minutes before you do and he falls asleep while you're driving five minutes in towards Stillwater, Oklahoma, as if he finally feels safe and comfortable enough to.

 

**…**

 

You stop at a diner for the coffee and breakfast you didn't take at the room and reach Stillwater four hours later in the afternoon. He's moaning and whimpering and pushing at something in his sleep and you're not thinking about what he might be seeing in his dreams. You try to wake him up without saying his name, without touching him (without making him real). He jerks awake in his seat, dazed and confused and scared, eyes huge as he looks around for whatever danger he was facing under his closed eyes. You don't stay around long enough to let him think you might be worried, because you're not.

You stare at the motel, just as dilapidated and shabby as the prior one. You go into the building with a repressed shudder and get a room, one king-sized bed again (the motel clerk looks through the window at the car, sees a boy inside and gives you an ineptly concealed look that you ignore), and he walks closely behind you the way he did before, ready to slip in after you quickly before the door closes shut.

When you discuss the case, finally, it's with a cold professionalism. He talks quietly, more like the phantom and less like the obstinate boy outside of Bobby's house. You and he settle on a spirit based on the freaky, strange nature of the deaths in the woods. No claw marks, bite marks, missing organs, shredded skins etc. After all theories and ideas and details are shared, he goes off to the library to search old news articles, newspapers, records or anything for the identity of the spirit, and you go talk to the witness mentioned for the most recent kill in the newspaper.

At night, the bones are burned, the hunt over. You remember the last time you stood in front of flames with him, and those flames are suddenly heating up inside of _you_ , so you turn around and walk away before those flames force your hands and your mouth into something imprudent and unwise.

Instead, you drive to the nearest bar and get drunk on a bottle and a half of whiskey.

 

**…**

 

In the first few seconds your mind muddles its way into consciousness, you are back to the life you had lived only about a month ago, alone and lost but more peaceful than this, than harboring your father's murderer and feeling wrong for it without a choice (putting Bobby through any more pain didn't seem like a choice at all). You open your eyes, and immediately clench them shut when the sun burns right through them. There's the sound of spraying water to remind you that you're no longer alone and lost on your own and peaceful.

You lay there for minutes because your head won't let you sit up straight, and your stomach doesn't want you to move unless you're alright with throwing up all over yourself. Eventually, though, you somehow manage to get up without dying of a hemorrhage or puking on your clothes. He's brought bacon and eggs and a coffee for you again, a case slipped at the bottom of it, and put it on the drawers beside you, the beverage bitter and black as you've always liked it. Today, you have no choice but to take it, and you feel the burn of hot coffee and guilt in your stomach for accepting something from the hands that are bloodied with your father's death.

You try to remember last night. There was drinking, obviously, and karaoke and flirting and almost taking a girl home before she passed out on the bar counter, so you took her phone and called one of her friends to pick her up even though you couldn't talk straight. You remember hazy bits of returning to the room, an image of him waiting up for you in the corner, before the world tilted and you dropped on something soft and then into darkness. You're not wearing your jacket or your boots anymore and the covers are on top of you rather than you on top of it, the way it should have been. You ignore this thought and drain the rest of your coffee in one gulp.

He sits in the car before you do again and only lets himself sleep while it's moving, while he's sure that he won't be waking up alone, while you don't have the choice to leave him.

 

**…**

 

The rest of the week is spent the same way, the same monotonous routine of moving from state-to-state for jobs, not talking more than necessary. He doesn't sleep at night and is up every morning before you are, showering after he's found a diner and a case (you have a feeling that he only showers later to be away from you as much as he can). He brings breakfast and caffeine for you everyday even though it's always left cold (you've noticed that the first thing he glances at when he comes out of the shower is your coffee cup ever since the hangover, as if searching for the smallest signs of hope), and he's in the car before you, falling asleep to rock music tunes and the roars of the engine and waking up with quiet moans and whimpers and pleas on his lips. You go to diners for lunch, converse about the case like stiff acquaintances, split off to libraries and witnesses' houses and other places that require more investigation or can provide more details, then the hunt, then back to the motel (sometimes a bar comes in before that), sometimes there's dinner when you and he are not too exhausted (sometimes he goes out and brings a bag for you but you don't take it), rinse and repeat.

You come out of the bathroom one night to find him asleep in the corner, sitting up against the wall in the most uncomfortable position you've ever seen, as if in the midst of an attempt at battling slumber. You feel a twinge of phantasmal pains in your own back and neck just looking at him, but you don't do anything about it. You slip into the bed, haul the covers up over your body, and stare up at the white ceiling, watching your thoughts play across it.

He's breathing in the silence, deep and even, cadenced lilts of soft squeaks when he inhales and faint snores when he exhales. He's breathing in the silence, and you think, _I wish they'd stop_.

It's a betrayal, hypocritical, when you find yourself falling asleep to it.

 

**…**

 

The next morning is the first time you're up before he is. It's surprising, to say the least, but expected with his terrible sleeping patterns. He's now lying on the ground on his side, although his neck is still uneasily craned without the support of his duffle bag or his rolled up jacket.

You go on with your day, feeling more human after your shower and coffee and breakfast. You find two cases that seem like a hunter's job and pick the one with more victims. He only wakes up when you're cleaning your guns and putting them in the bag one by one at the table, and there's a slightly comical moment where he just stares at you the first few seconds, before he suddenly jumps up, eyes wide with wild panic. He scrambles for his clothes from his bag, whatever are the first things he catches, runs into the bathroom and cramps everything he needs to do into a seven minutes time somehow.

He stumbles out with his shirt inside out and his boots unlaced and soap on his hair and chin. You're at the car, tossing your bags in, and he rushes to the passenger seat before you could even move away from the trunk.

It takes you a little while longer than usual to do everything that day, but this is not done on purpose.


	6. Chapter 6

He doesn't complain when sitting up against walls every night begins to take its toll on his body. He doesn't complain any more than a pained grimace on his face whenever he's moving (slow and hunched over) or a quiet moan when he has to lower himself down into the passenger seat or into a chair or into his corner. But there comes a point when he can't sleep anymore in the car because of it, can't stay still, shifting again and again and again. It gets annoying after a while, so you start taking rooms with two queens, hoping he'd stop walking like an old man and stop taking your concentration off the road with his constant squirming. When that doesn't work either, you go out to the nearest drugstore and come back with painkillers and heat-packs and throw them at his chest. He looks up at you with the utmost relief and gratitude (as if you weren't the reason why he was hurting in the first place) and curls up on his bed to decompress his spine.

He starts walking straight again a while later. He starts sleeping in beds instead of cars. He starts bringing you coffee and food again that's always left untouched. You still don't understand why he keeps doing that.

You're on your way to Bettendorf, Iowa for another salt-and-burn. The music is on, but you're not tapping your fingers on the steering wheel (you can't remember doing anything so blithe since the day you stopped seeing the world as something brighter than what it is now) and he's not sleeping and he's not saying anything about the volume that drowns out the awkwardness in the silence. He's staring out of the window, not really looking at anything past his faded reflection catching sunlight on the transparent glass, his head leaning against the car door so you could see the side of his face, his gaze seemingly trapped in whatever images and thoughts are playing inside his head. You're staring at him again and you don't know why (it's getting harder and harder to not make him real when you're seeing him all the time now).

You look back at the endless highway stretching out ahead instead, the roads and the grassy sides and the distant fogged mountains melded into the afternoon blue skies coming together to meet as one in front of you. An end that never comes. It's kind of beautiful, you think, and you think that this is something really nice to notice when it happens only once in a while, when you feel it so rarely, how the sun, so bright that it's almost white when you look at it, makes the world a bit brighter and warmer than it seems most of the time, even if just for a while.

Just for a while ends quite soon. The feeling fades when you blink, even as you try to hold on to it, chase it, but all that's left is an ersatz, a frustrating faux memory of what it felt like.

It's forgotten completely by the time you cross the state-lines.

 

**…**

The regular procedure of investigation and research is over by night, and all there's left is to unearth and burn the body of the spirit. He stands guard with a rock-salt shotgun ready to fire at any disruption, and you're digging up the cemetery dirt and rocks. It's almost too easy, and you're thinking that it might be over soon, maybe with minimal interruptions. But then knowledge from past experience wins out over your desperate need to get this done and find a bar and then a bed, and that's when the ghost appears, slit pale neck drenching her white gown in dried blood, and he shoots her just as she raises her arm, swift and sharp, his head and shoulders perked up and more alert than when he was waiting for the trouble to arrive.

Your shovel hits something hard, finally, and she appears after a while again, behind him. The one second it takes for you to open your mouth and for him to spin around is enough time for her to fling him into a tree. You pour salt and flick up your lighter, and you drop it just before she throws you head-first into a gravestone.

She explodes in a fiery combustion and echoes of haunted screams, and then it all goes black.

You wake up to gentle hands cradling your head and light strokes of a cloth over your burning temple. It's kind of nice, if a bit callous and trembling. You open your eyes, and it's him again, the first thing you see, the way it was at Bobby's house. You're frozen for a second, staring at him (touching you, real, the way a phantom shouldn't be), and he's the same when he catches your open eyes. He opens his mouth, hesitant and ready to explain, "I have to—"

You shove away from him. He backs off compliantly, puts down the bloody cloth beside you and slips away (maybe he stumbles away, but you're not sure). You don't look up to see where, but the bed beside yours creaks after a while. You clean away the rest of the blood, disinfect it, and realize at some point that you might have a mild concussion. When you glance over at him after, he's already asleep, bruises pushing his eyes into his pale face. Pale because of the blood he's losing through the wound on his side, seeping through his still grimy shirts and his motel sheets. Pale because he's stupid as fuck for going to sleep when he's bleeding like a slaughtered pig (pale because he focused on you first, tired himself out before he could get to his own injury).

So you get off your bed with a groan, your head still throbbing, with the medical kit in your hand, thinking that you can't let him bleed out unless you're okay with Bobby shooting your ass full of buckshot the next time you see him (unless you're okay with waking up to his dead body the next morning, and your stomach churns at the thought with something that you refuse to acknowledge). He sleeps noiselessly tonight, and barely moves when you lift his shirt up, clean the blood on and around the jagged gouge on his side (maybe from a branch on the tree that he was thrown against, maybe he fell on something when he dropped down from such a height). His face scrunches up in pain when you pour some peroxide on the wound, but he keeps on sleeping soundly (there's an image that keeps trying to come up in your mind, of a little boy with floppy brown hair sleeping with chubby arms around your waist, and you keep pushing it down).

Stitching his wound is the hardest part when you're trying not to touch him too much and trying not to fuck up his skin, but it's when you give up on trying at all, even if all you want is to not have to do this. But when it's over, cleaned and stitched and bandaged, you breathe a sigh of relief. You stumble towards the bathroom, wash your hands of the blood soaking your palm and fingers, and try not to feel like you've betrayed the memory of the father who burned to ashes seven years ago (lately, you've been doing this a lot).

You slip under the covers with a pained groan, the pressure in your head still nagging at you. Your head turns to the window, where the fair moonlight is pouring in, bathing him in it. He's facing you, arm reaching out towards you, and there is a long white scar drawn from his elbow to his wrist, where the light seems to frame itself around it, as if it's trying to show it to you, and you're staring at it. There's something trying to shove its way into your chest, but you are not letting it in.

Your eyes are drooping with exhaustion, the temptation of slumber pulling at you, but you stare at the scar for a long, long time. Your eyes keep flickering lazily between the inflections of his thin chest, up and down and up and down and up and down, and the scar that tells too many stories of those five years you were gone. There's something trying to shove its way into your chest again, but you are not letting it in, and you have stopped giving these feelings a name a long time ago.

And if you will remember this later, you will blame it on your mild concussion, when on the closest edge of sleep, your fingers find their way to a wrist briefly, just a soft brush that you can barely feel, lingering for two seconds until you feel the beating pulse underneath them, before sliding off altogether.

 

**…**

 

You don't talk to him the next morning, as always, but he sometimes glances at you as if there's something to hope for (still pale and weak and foolishly hopeful). But there is nothing to hope for, so he's delusional and stupid if he thinks there is. You show him just as much the week after, at night when you're trying to blow off steam and loosen up after the hunt, when you go to a bar and he tags along with you for reasons unknown, and the bartender asks, _Friends?_ when he sits beside you (why she really cares, you don't know). _No,_ he tells her. _Brothers,_ she guesses. _No_ , you tell her. The bartender sees the way his face presumably falls, and says nothing after that, but brings him a few more shots of whatever than he asked for.

After that, he stops glancing over at you as if there is something to hope for.

 

**…**

 

The room is a tornado of colors around you, and you are swaying even while you're sitting, alcohol burning down your gullet and vitiating your liver. The bar is closing down and there are hands grasping at your shoulders, pulling your glass shots off your hands and then you off the stool, carrying you out through the door. Your brain feels like mush and fuzz, and you don't really remember how the world shifted from bright bulb lights aching in your eyes to the dark and pallid moonlit streets, and you don't really know who's steering you in all the right directions towards your motel room, but you suddenly become aware that you're walking through its door.

The next thing you know, there is a force pushing gently against your chest, and your head's already spinning and your legs are already not cooperating so you fall down, tripping over. You wait for pain to explode wherever it's supposed to, but all you feel is something soft under your head and back. Your feet are being lifted and placed on that soft something too.

There's a light weight spread over your body, trapping warmth inside of it. There's a voice over your head, warmer and softer (maybe a little sad too), saying, "G'night, Dean."


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: implied beating. Dissociation/derealization.

**May 2005**

 

It's May third and you wake up with lingering images of a gun in a thin hand pointing at your father in your dreams. Tomorrow will mark the day you put your father's body into the pyres. Pale face and a bullet-hole in his forehead, you still remember. Sam (you can think of him with his name now, without him melding into the Sammy with the big-dimples and the small, soft hand inside your hand in your mind. Three years is enough time to learn, to get used to it, to make him a person but not the same person you once felt oceans of love for) stood there and he stared without blinking and you didn't know that he was the monster who did it because he was Sammy, because he was the one who called you on the phone and whispered, lost and confused and like he didn't know what had happened at all, "Dad's dead," and didn't speak a word after this for the next three months.

Your life is still mostly the same as it was three years before, the same old tedious thing, dreary and depressing and you can't differentiate yesterday from the day before and the day before and the day before because it's all the same. The deadening years go by unchanged. You keep waiting for him to give up, to leave, say that he can't do this and that he never should have come in the first place, and he doesn't. It's become a kind of game at some point, to see if he breaks first and walks out the door, wondering if it'll be this day or the next week or the next month. He's still here three years later.

It's May third and today's the day you got that call from him and you did not know at the time that it will end three months later in 'it's true'. The people around you go on as if today means nothing, because they didn't lose their only blood parent on this day, and maybe there are some people here who feel the same sense of significance though for different reasons. But there is something outrageously unjust and maddening about the fact that nobody knows that the man who's saved so many of their lives and their loved ones' lives, state-to-state and monster-to-monster, from being potentially taken is dead.

It's May third again ten years later since that day and everything hits you as hard as it did the first time, but now with a sense of familiarity. You've already gone through this too many times before, and maybe you will go through this again and again and again for the rest of your life. They say that time heals all wounds, but you don't feel it because today everything comes back to stab you in the chest and burn you inside your ruptured veins and make you sick and heavy and trapped. And maybe you won't feel it as long as he's there. Sam. As long as Sam's there.

You don't know how to make him leave. And all you want to do is scream the most horrible things you could think of at him and hit him until your hands are broken and bloody and wound him the worst way you can until he's broken and bloody too and you know that none of it will matter because you just know, and it makes you sicker and angrier and heavier and even more trapped, but you know that none of that will make him leave.

These urges come out in short bursts at every single thing he does today. He brings you coffee and you hurl it at the wall. You bang on the door when he's taking a shower even though it's only been five minutes. He sleeps in the car because he stayed awake the whole night to stare at the ceiling and you snap at him to wake up because the pathetic noises he's making is grating on your nerves. He talks too quietly when he tells you about the case of the day and it pisses you off.

"Speak like you want to be heard or shut the fuck up," you hiss at him spitefully.

He somehow seems to grow smaller and thinner and quieter every year, like he's slowly dissipating into nothing. You wonder how many years it would take for that to happen. You just want him to disappear.

He clenches his jaw and speaks louder. "It's a manticore. That's what it sounds like anyway from Dad's journal…"

It bristles against something raw inside of you, hearing that word in his voice. The snarl comes out before you can even think about stopping it. "Don't you dare fucking call him that. Not on the day you took his life."

He's not afraid of you. You know this already. He has looked at you and spoken to you with a lot of emotions, but fear has never been one of them. He tries to be invisible because that's what he believes he owes to you. You knew this, knew that he'd snap but this is good because then he could give you a reason to fight him. It's hard to have it when he's barely ever louder than a whisper. You're full of fire and grief and you want to pour it all out onto the person who put it there.

He grinds his teeth together and flings the journal down, jerking up from his seat, "You know what, I've taken enough of your shit! What the fuck do you want me to do about it now, huh? Yes, I killed him. I fucking killed him. And I'm sorry-"

"'Cause that'll cut it," you sneer.

"No. No, it won't. And taking your hate out on me is not gonna make you feel better either. And it sure as well won't do him any good because he's in fucking Hell!"

There's the reason you've been waiting for.

You don't know when you let go, and you don't know when you come back to yourself. You don't know how everything in-between had happened, when it had stopped being a fight on equal standing, when you were the one over him with your fists in his shirt and he was on the ground with blood in his mouth, face hidden behind his arms. But it's like you've just woken up from being knocked out and now you're staring at a body curled up tightly against the wall, cowering protectively and heaving and shaking. You can't see his face, but you can see your hands, and there's blood and bruised skin and you feel like you're looking through water, and nothing seems real and you feel like you've just been watching your life happen to someone else. The lights are too bright and the world is too dim and sharp and you feel sick from the smell of blood and violence. You're staring down at your hands, dazed and confused. You don't feel like yourself.

"I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry—" he's whimpering, pleading.

You grab your jacket and keys on the way out. You get in the car and drive nowhere and wish that you'd get so lost that even you can't find yourself.

 

...

 

You throw up on the side of the road four kilometers in and when the blood on your blazing knuckles starts feeling too heavy on your skin, you grab a cloth and scrub so hard that you just end up tearing off skin, your blood mingling with his (your bone slamming against his bone. You throw up again. You wanted to hurt him, but it was supposed to be with words, not fists, not like this). You lean against the side of the car, hands shaking between your knees, head bowed as you breathe through another bout of sickness, and you want to scream and you can't pinpoint on why anymore because there's too many things to want to scream about.

You call Bobby, and he picks up on the fifth ring. "Dean? Everythin' alright?"

You open your mouth, try to say something, try to find the words that keep running away from you and leaving you blank. You feel confused and lost, stuck in the middle of an endless desert, sky and sand all around you and you don't know which way to go from here and you're not sure if whichever way you choose will be the one that finally gets you out. You feel like some things inside of you had gone loose and then got fixed together the wrong way over time after years and years of losing yourself under the bottom of a car, on hunts, the bottom of a whiskey bottle, and maybe you've finally lost yourself for good now. "I…" You inhale shakily, your eyes hot with tears and your throat aching and your nose twinging as the cold air mixes with grief. "I don't… I don't feel right, Bobby. I don't know how to…b-but it's like I'm not-not all there, you know? Not just today, but, it's been like this a lot for a long time. But today… god, I don't know how it even happened. It's not like I meant to but he made me so mad with the things he said and then-and then-I don't know what to do-fuck, I'm so fucking angry and sad and I don't know how to get it all out of me-" You realize that you're blabbering incoherently and you sound stupid as fuck and it probably doesn't even make sense to Bobby because none of it even makes sense to you but you just- you just want someone to understand even though you don't even know what it is that you want them to understand.

"Dean, calm down," Bobby says, cutting off your broken, shaky rambling. "Just take a deep breath and tell me what it is."

And you take a deep breath and you do. And you think that he's going to be pissed as fuck, but he just stays silent for a long time before he breathes a sad and weary sigh and you wish you hadn't called him because you've never wanted to hear him sound like this again. You don't know what he'll say. Maybe he'll tell you to bring Sam to him, keep him away from you (you hope he will, but you also hope he won't because if he does then you know you won't be able to say no).

He says, "I know yer hurting a lot. Especially on this day. It's gonna be okay. You'll get through this, like ye always do."

And he says, "Why don't you two come over at my house? You've been stuck with each other in small spaces too damn long."

And he says, "I know you didn't realize you were doin' it, son, but… if you do that again, you ain't ever comin' back here."

You wish he'd understand, even if you don't deserve any understanding. You say your byes and the call ends. When it does, there's a shard of white headlights cutting at your eyes. You look up, squinting into it, and there's a large truck swerving unsteadily towards you.

 

...

 

You're at the door, your hands reaching out for the knob. You're wondering whether he's still there or whether he's finally gone. You hope it's the latter, because you don't know how to stand him anymore, especially not on a day like this. There's an awareness in the back of your mind that the day hasn't ended yet, and the significance of it won't for another week or two, and your stomach throbs with sorrow and nausea up to your throat. You push against the door and watch the space peeking inside the room widen, your mind bouncing between the image of an empty room or an image of him on the bed every second.

And, as you've thought, even after everything, he's still there.

He looks up at you and catches your eye, quickly looks away half a second later. He has the first aid kit in front of him and you notice that his hands are shaking slightly even though he tries to seem composed and his gaze is rooted to them a little too firmly, and you wish he'd leave so you wouldn't have to deal with this (wouldn't have to face this and the stones piling up in your chest for someone who ruined you so thoroughly).

"We're gonna have to steal a car tomorrow and go to Bobby's for a while," you tell him, empty face, empty voice, even as your loose fists ripple with pain and phantasmal collisions from memories you don't remember. You clench your hands tightly. "Drunk driver rammed into the Impala. Bobby's coming to tow it since he's not that far from here."

"Are you okay?" he asks quietly, his gaze roving over you, sees no blood or injury except for the blood on your elbows and knees. You got out of the way just barely, but you did. The driver, fucking stupid as he was, didn't really deserve to die, so you had to call 911 for him.

You don't answer him (you wish he never asked you that).You crawl into your bed, too tired to clean up your wounds (it's been a long, long day and you just want to stop existing, just want complete oblivion), your head burrowing into the thick pillow where all the cotton inside is mashed and sticking together and splitting apart unevenly on both sides. The next thing you know, you're standing in a room with your knuckles red and torn-skinned and there's a gun in it and it's aimed at your father's head. Blood on walls and splattered on your father's bullet-holed forehead, caked into his dark hair and under your nails. When you speak, it's in Sam's voice, confused and lost, "Sammy killed your daddy." And then everything bursts alight with flames, spreading all over as everything is devoured by the orange radiance, smoke itching at your throat and filling up your lungs until there's no air left.

You snap back into the living world coughing, with a scream pushing up your throat and held back inside your tongue. You feel Sam's eyes boring into you, but he doesn't say anything, and you don't fall asleep again after. The rest of the night is spent like this, both of you silent and inside your own heads.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To all those who are worried about this being an abusive Dean/Dean-negative story: please understand that it is not. I adore Dean with all of my heart, and hence I wrote of his terrible remorse in the aftermath because he's a good person. The explosive reaction was only meant to be realistic, not to paint him in a negative light, and though his extreme actions may not be justifiable, he was bound to lash out in such a way after his overwhelming trauma and adversary, especially after having bottled it up for so long. I can't imagine a person being wholly stable in Dean's position.
> 
> I am trying to keep them neutral, trying not to make one seem like the bad guy and the other the good guy. There are no sides to me because they are both in a horrible and complicated situation.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: brief mention of suicide.

The next two days are spent mending whatever you could of your car. The damage is severe, which would be expected since the truck rammed straight into the car, fucked up a lot of things along the way, so you fix what you can until the Chevrolet 67' car doors and fenders are shipped here. It's good, because May third is still not far away enough yet. The manticore case is taken up by another hunter, and even though hunting is the one thing that gives you anything close to meaning, the break is much-needed.

"Bobby's calling you in. Lunch's ready," Sam's voice pipes up. You almost look up reflexively, but you catch yourself in time because you don't want to see his face, the bruises marring and swelling his skin, cuts from metallic rings splitting it apart. It doesn't look any worse than after a hunt, once the blood is all gone, but it still makes your stomach lurch (because you know that they didn't come from a real monster), your knuckles heavy with its own wounds.

He doesn't wait for an answer. He's stopped waiting for them a long time ago, so he turns around and walks back inside.

He keeps his distance from you, ever since that night. It's not really a bad thing, but you can't help but notice that the distance is too wide and safe, enough that you can't touch him (hurt him) if you wanted to, and that he flinches every time you move too fast, and that his hands shake a little whenever you're in the same room as him.

 

**...**

 

The thing is, after you've put together all that you could of the car, and repaired the few other cars that needed repairing, there's no bottom of one left to lose yourself under, no other work to hide in until the car parts arrive. And May third is still too close and all there's left is whiskey, but after a day of you drinking to the brink of alcohol poisoning, Bobby has enough of it and forbids you from accessing the liquor cabinet. Which shouldn't really stop you, but he looked ready to grab his buckshot and shoot you with it, and you've learned a long time ago not to mess with the man.

So you're back to hunting now. Well, as good as the break was, maybe you were getting a bit restless anyway.

You find a case located in the Old House Woods of Matthews County, Virginia, six people dead from car accidents in the past four months, either ran into a tree or off a cliff, because something fucked with the brakes of their cars. One victim who was able to escape by breaking through the windows says the locks were all jammed, and the doors wouldn't budge no matter what.

 

**…**

 

He's drinking whiskey straight out of a bottle in the kitchen. A rare sight. He looks up and catches your eyes, his full of red and heavy sorrow, bruises still too dark and fresh on his face and making his sorrow look sadder, and you don't know what to do so you turn around and leave.

You have this hunch that he wanted to say something, that he was about to, the kind of things you don't ever tell each other anymore because they're not something you talk about with the man who killed your father or the man whose father you killed. Things that aren't said in a tone of detached professionalism about hunting and monsters and victims. You wonder what it might have been if you stayed around long enough to listen.

Tomorrow morning, you will get into a shitty car that's not yours, that looks like it has seen better days—a lot better days—and maybe he will be there. Maybe he won't be. Maybe after this third May, he wouldn't want to be here for another third May, and that would be good. That would be good. Maybe he will stand outside the car door and he will say, "I'm done running around with you, Dean. I'm stayin' here." And Bobby will take him in again and—

And then Sam would go and do something fucking stupid like eat a bullet or jump off a bridge, and then Bobby would be there to find his suicide note or his body, and he'd be there to wonder why because he would always believe that Sam had a reason, and he'd be there to grieve over the fact that he'd never know because he wasn't there at the right place and time to stop him. He'd be there to get caught in shit that wasn't his to get caught in, and you will not let that happen.

Here, with you, he thinks that there's something he needs to be around for. He thinks he needs to look out for you and keep you alive, and he takes it as some kind of a mission or a purpose or the only thread that's keeping him tethered to this world, and if it gets cut or snapped apart, he'll float away. That's what Bobby had told you, and you don't know what makes him think that, but then sometimes you look at Sam, so sunken in and deadened and sad most of the time, and there are moments when he's staring out the window of the car and there's something almost, almost like peace on his face. Maybe not peace, but a kind of resigned acceptance, perhaps. Like this is the best it can get for somebody like him and it's enough.

Bobby had once said before, "It doesn' make sense, maybe. But I think, bein' with you? This is the best I've seen him."

He was right. It didn't really make sense.

You look back and Bobby's there, Sam in tow with his arm around his shoulder, head rolling on his neck. They're walking upstairs to the guest room and you decide to wait until he's fallen asleep.

Here's something that happens, that you'll wonder about for a long, long time after. You're stepping up the stairs a half an hour or so later, and Bobby comes out of the room, and he looks nauseously pale and red-eyed and aghast and you're asking him, "Bobby, everything alright?" and he says nothing. He doesn't seem to know you're there.

He closes the door behind him and walks past you and you let him. You can only watch his retreating back until it turns and disappears little by little down the stairwell. You turn back to the room, turn the doorknob of it and push it open, and Sam's lying there on his bed, head turned away towards the wall in a whiskey-glazed slumber.

And you can't imagine what the hell happened in that room to put that look there on Bobby's face, and you want to know. You want to shake Sam awake and ask him (but those aren't the things you're supposed to talk about with him) or you want to go up to Bobby and check on him but you don't do any of that. Something stops you from it, roots you to the spot, and you stand there over him and try to think through the confusion and blankness until your already tired legs begin to ache, so you turn and crawl into your bed and lie down.

Sleep comes easy at times now but the dreams are always not of ease. You still jerk awake from remnant visions of guns and your dead father and fire (and sometimes, _sometimes_ , you dream about walking into a bathroom to find empty hazel eyes and a long white cut on a cold arm and chestnut brown hair stuck to the ground in dried blood).

There's sunlight blinding your eyes when you open them. There's a rustle from somewhere around you. You sit up painfully slow, rub your eyes groggily, and you look at Sam, blanched face and shadowed eyes from a nasty hangover, and maybe something else that you can't really fathom, but a thought pipes up in your head, wondering if it has anything to do with what happened last night. His eyes are red and his brows are settled into a frown and his hands are quivering at his sides. For some reason, he looks like he's about to break down, standing there over his duffel with his hand tightly gripping the strap, head bowed and his chin clenched, lips trembling.

You pretend not to notice that.

When you're standing outside, ready to leave, Bobby seems as awful as Sam. They don't talk or interact, no embraces shared or words exchanged. Sam never chances a look at Bobby, while Bobby can't seem to stop looking at him, and it's a strange image because Sam has never been afraid of Bobby like this and Bobby has never been speechless and lost and devastated like this. There is a need to speak on the tip of his tongue, you can see it on his face, but he doesn't have the words.

Sam rushes over to the passenger's side of the car. He gets in. You get in. You look at him and at Bobby curiously, but you never ask because you shouldn't care enough to. The car purrs and starts and it drives on until the roads become lonely and long and endless. That's that.

 

**...**

 

You go to interview the escaped victim, and she tells you everything you already know from the newspapers. Jammed doors, screwed brakes and locks, couldn't understand what was going on, but she also tells you, after some cajoling ("nothing too strange to tell, ma'am"), that there were cold spots and the sense of a presence that she couldn't see before she got into the car.

Sam looks through old reports and articles and finds the story of a woman, Hayley Roth, who died in those woods under the same conditions. Having her life taken so suddenly and unexpectedly, she was not ready to move on and remained trapped here, restless and enraged at the world and so subjecting it to the same fate as hers.

All details are found. Tonight you go to the cemetery her body was buried in, and it should've been easy and simple the way salt-and-burn cases often are, but it wasn't. God, it wasn't. The way your whole world unraveled by one unseen pull and fell apart like a house of cards. Funny how you came in and you thought you'd leave the same way you left every other hunt, but you didn't. And he didn't. Funny, indeed, how you never know that you're minutes away from that moment your life falls off a cliff in a car.

 

**…**

 

The bitch knocks you the wrong way against a gravestone, and you hear it the second your leg snaps a bone. Fuck, it hurts right down to your toes, agony radiating down to them in waves. You fall down to the ground with a choked groan, grimacing. Sitting there against the tree that Hayley Roth's car had once crashed into in 1997, you're suddenly not sure if he will come back to pick you off the ground and carry you to the car, because you haven't fractured a leg in years. You're not sure how far he'll go to help you now, and maybe this is as far as it gets, where the line stops, especially after all the ones you crossed with him.

But he does come along to pick you off the ground and carry you to the car, grabbing you by the elbows and pulling you up and wrapping his arms around your waist, yours around his shoulders (it leaves you asking where exactly that line ends).

You hobble along with him, the spirit fortunately still gone for now. The grave was not even halfway dug when she came in, and so there's not enough time for one person to finish the hunt. She will kill either you or him before he's done and there isn't any point in trying when that's so obvious. You feel dizzy and cold from the agony and you're ready to pass out by the time you reach the shitty car. He puts you in the passenger seat and gets into the driver's seat, and you haul out of there.

But the car is rumbling on and Hayley is left behind. And when she's far away enough, Sam tries to stop the car and it doesn't. There is a moment of frozen realization passing over his face, the cold jolt of fear that twitches his eyes up and far-off. Your heart pounds in an imitation of those same emotions, your mind a frantic whirlwind to the point where you can't catch a clear thought and you can't _think_ as the car speeds down to your death and his. You swallow down panic while he tries the door in some instinctive reaction, trying to find any solution possible, but it won't budge, the door stuck and locked without relent.

And here, you're watching him again, even now, and he's still so fucking young, and in the vulnerability of the moment (the finality of it), your heart opens up and he's still that same little boy with bouncy hair and big eyes and dimples like crescent moons in his cheeks. He's that same boy you felt oceans of love for. He is. He is here and he is real and he is going to die.

It leaves as soon as it comes, and you focus on the situation. You lean forward, grabbing a hold of Sam's wrist. His head snaps up at the contact. "My duffel bag, Sam," you say, sounding more composed than you really are. "In the backseat. Get the shotgun out. Break the window and get out, alright?"

He stares at you, wide-eyed, swallowing.

"Come on! We don't have time!" you yell.

He spurs into action, twisting around and reaching over for the duffel bag from between the gap of the seats. He grabs a hold of it and drags it close to himself, unzips it, digging through the items frantically with trembling hands until he pauses, and he pulls out a shotgun.

And then—

The car keeps speeding on and on. His face suddenly smooths out into something calm and fine, all that fear draining out of his eyes and mouth and shoulders, and it's like he's the only still thing in a world where everything's going too fast. He looks at you and smiles softly (sadly) in a way that doesn't make sense to you. Time slows down for a moment (or maybe it's just the bumps and jostles and the blurring roads and the panic of it all falling away for a few seconds), and you're staring at him, confused. He's looking at you as if he's seeing you for the last time, and that you being the last thing he sees is all he needed, and his smile still doesn't make sense to you.

The tires eat up the road beneath as the end comes closer and closer, and he leans over and slams it hard against the car window on your side. You want to ask, "what the fuck are you doing?" because he was supposed to try to escape himself, try to smash that shotgun against his side of the window to bail himself out.

So you do ask. "What the fuck are you doing?"

"You're going to be okay, Dean," is all he says, his face scrunched up with concentration and the force he's exerting as the back of the shotgun bashes into the laminated glass over and over, the noise pounding into your brain.

You grasp his arm and he pauses for only a second, before continuing. "Sam, _no_. Listen, I'm a gimp right now, okay? You're the one who can make it out of here."

"Well, I'm not going to." The collisions keep going, into the glass and into your aching head.

"Goddamnit, just get yourself out first! I'll be right behind you!"

"There probably won't be enough time for the both of us," he argues, the side of his ribs shoved up against the side of your shoulder, jerking with every clash on the window.

"Alright, you know what? Bobby's going to _shoot_ me if I let you die."

He laughs a little, but it sounds all wrong, too forced and shaky and breathless, and like he doesn't think it's funny at all. "And you think he'll spare me if I let _you_ die?"

"I'm not kidding."

"Neither am I." The frustration and anger erupt into something bigger, tightening up your chest and coursing through your veins like fire through gasoline.

"God, no, fucking listen to me! Stop trying to be some goddamn hero and help yourself!"

Sam's always been so fucking stubborn and selfish. Always did whatever the hell he wanted. Never stopped to think about what it might do to others.

He never stops.

"It's going to be okay," he says, winded and determined, and as if he didn't hear a word you said. His eyes seemed glazed over, almost as if in some kind of trance. "It's going to be okay."

You don't realize what you're saying until you've said it.

"Sammy, please." It was too soft and quiet and you don't think he heard you, and you can't stop staring at him, can't stop seeing bouncy hair and big eyes and crescent-moon dimples. "Please."

"You're going to be okay."

That's all he keeps saying, right until the window shatters and the pieces fly all over and he's pushing you out. It's the last thing you hear from him, muffled and cut off as air fills up your ears and drowns out his voice.

The world flips over as you fall out, and it spins and it spins and it spins, agony exploding all over your leg and jarring your skull, and when it stops and you lift your head up as much as the vertigo and pain allows, the car is driving on and on until finally the ground vanishes under it and it leaps, throwing dirt as it does, before disappearing down the edge.

And you are lying there watching it happen, shackled down by a damaged leg, and your pummeling heart lurches down to your feet painfully before stopping altogether. And it's all frozen silence after you gasped out something (maybe it was his name), and it's all silence in return and you keep waiting for a voice to break through the still, quiet air.

You keep staring and staring and staring at the edge of that cliff, as if expecting him to somehow emerge from there by some phenomenal miracle, unscathed. And then there is the distant, stifled sound of an explosion from somewhere far down below. You're crying and turning your head away as if turning away from it would mean you didn't really see it, clenching your hot and hazy eyes shut, your heavy throat and chest trying to sink you through the ground, your head bleeding red into the dirt and your leg swollen and throbbing.

 

**…**

 

The adrenaline has worn out long before, leaving you exhausted and still in anguish. You pass out and wake up the next morning to find a pair of hikers in your line of vision, shaking your shoulder and saying words that don't reach you through the sickening ripples of pain hurtling up your leg, the nagging ache in your temple, but you're saying—and you don't know why you're saying this when you already know it's pointless because you were _there_ —but you're saying to them, "M-my brother-" You swallow down the realization that you haven't called him that in years, and it feels like glass shards cutting down your throat.

They look half-confused and half-concerned, hovering over you on the ground. You continue, "'was a car acc-accident. H-he fell off that cliff back there." Your eyes are prickling again, but you're so tired.

"When'd this happen?" the girl asks, and the boy stares silently at you.

"Las' night," you say, and they look at each other uncertainly, and they might be wondering why you're talking about him as if he's still alive, as if there's hope. They look at you again, and they look like they don't know what to tell you, or that they don't know what you want them to do. You don't know either.

Everything goes black, and maybe you'll wake up in the same place you are now or somewhere better (somewhere far, far away from here) and maybe after the way your insides are shredding apart when it all strikes into you again in that second, you won't wake up at all, but there is no longer any pain.

 

**…**

 

You open your eyes to white ceiling and walls and drips of morphine in your ear. Your leg is in a cast, your head bandaged, and you're looking up at the ceiling and for the first few seconds, in that space between sleep and awake, in the haze of painkiller drugs, you can't remember why the inside of your chest is so heavy and hollow. And then you remember and you wish you never did.

And for the longest time, you lie there and you stare at the whitewashed ceiling and you watch that car go off the cliff over and over.

 

**…**

 

You're standing a few days later in the parking lot of the hospital with crutches under your arm. You're looking up at it, the building towering over you, and you have a phone (cracked screen but it still works) but no car and no bags and nobody beside you to make sure you don't trip and fall on your face.

You've been in this place before, standing alone, and you felt alone back then but you feel so much more alone now, like this city and this world is too big when there's nobody standing next to you (crowding your space but never, never touching). It's different and it's worse and you still feel like you could wake up any moment to find that you're in your bed with coffee and breakfast and a newspaper on your night table.

But you never really wake up from this endless dream that keeps going for days and days and days.

So you are standing there with your phone in your hand, and you're calling Bobby to tell him that the boy he took in for the past ten years is dead, and there is a moment of detached marvel at how your life became from that to that to this. You're standing there with your phone in your hand and he picks up the phone and you're saying, "Sam's gone."

And you think you understand now, why Sam sounded the way he did when he told you your father was dead on that phone. You watched it all happen in front of your eyes and you still feel lost and confused and like you don't know what had happened at all either.

Bobby is now asking you what had happened. You're not answering him. He's almost pleading but you can't get any more words out because there is something pulling you down from the inside, and suddenly all you want to do is sleep so that you can forget that this isn't a dream even though it feels like it. Maybe this is cruel, but you hang up the phone.

That was the last time you spoke to him.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: suicidal ideation, derealization/depersonalization towards the end, non-graphic mentions of physical abuse and forced child prostitution (briefly)

It's reeling in your head, over and over, like an intangible, invisible movie screen stuck to every vacant space you stare at. The entrapping feeling, the frenzied panic, the whirring speed.

How young he looked with terror in his eyes (the same eyes that stared at you, still too big for his face, whenever thunder rumbled outside the motel room, and he held your hand gently under the blankets and tried to smile bravely at you as if he even needed to be brave when it was only you, but you were still damn proud of him for it).

How it all washed out of him and he looked at you in the softest fucking way.

The smile that didn't make sense and is making sense now. It's like a blurred image becoming sharp and clear in your mind, finding meaning to a language you didn't understand.

_This is my silent goodbye to you. This is my apology for all that I've ruined. This is my compensation for all that I could not fix._

How he said, "it's going to be okay," like they were a promise to you.

Sometimes, you think about it all, the way his gaze was so deep into his head and so far away from this world, so entranced and desperate with some need for peace inside his eyes and inside of him, the way he smiled at you like he already knew that he was never going to see you again even when it was uncertain. Sometimes, you wonder if, in the car that night, he had become the same boy who had once swallowed a bottle of pills and cut his arms open and put a gun to his head. You wonder if he had even wanted to get out of the car at all.

Sometimes, you think about that night Bobby came out of the room, looking as if he's become one of the ghosts he hunted himself. You think about the day after, when you and Sam were leaving, and how he looked at him as if there was something to put together in him, but all the pieces weren't there, or maybe like there were so many that he didn't know where to start, so lost for words that he seemed like he forgot how to speak. He couldn't keep his eyes off of him, and Sam looked like he could never bear to come back to that house again.

Funny, how clarity comes in after a loss. All you can think about is that reason you never asked for.

 

**…**

 

You're holed up in a cheap, small apartment that you've been paying for with your fake credit cards, leg out of the cast since last week, running on canned food and coffee.

The first month, you spent a lot of your time drowning your thoughts in whiskey and television. And when the noise inside your head got louder than it, and when you got so sick and tired of it that you couldn't even bring yourself to pick up the remote again, you drank and drank and drank until you passed out because you didn't want to grieve for him. Because you didn't want to make him equal to your father by breaking over him in the same way. Because you didn't want to think about the way he set fire to your life and then saved it at the expense of his own, as if he had any fucking right to.

There was a feeling that you felt too often at that time. When, sometimes you looked at the empty bed and the empty side table and the empty space next to you and something stirred inside of you. It was uncomfortable, and after a while, you began to recognize it as something trapped, closed down, trying to escape. Almost like that feeling you got when you saw the wrapped newspaper on Sam's table, when Bobby told you about those three times he found him on the verge of death by his own hand, and when you saw that scar in the moonlight. That nameless feeling.

You felt it every single time you were reminded of him.

You were reminded of him a lot. Or maybe you just remembered him a lot. You felt it every single fucking time.

And you _hated_ how he never really left you alone even when he was gone. You wanted him gone so long and then he had, but he was still fucking there, stuck in the forefront of your mind, and you couldn't stop thinking about him and you couldn't stop feeling that feeling and it made you so fucking angry.

You couldn't stop remembering him, and you couldn't stop feeling it try to push out of you, this loss of him that was like a withdrawal because he had always been _there_ , always right there, every day for the past three years (all your life, even in the years you weren't with him, he stood in the back of your mind and watched you try to ignore he ever existed), and then he wasn't, and it was like you were always reaching for something too far out of reach. Everywhere you looked, he was not there, and that was all it took to remind you of him.

The first month, you tried your hardest not to feel anything for him. But god, there was too much time for thinking and feeling and no way to get out of it with a fractured leg, so you thought and you felt and sometimes, it all spilled out anyway. It spilled out, the rage at what he had done and the way you still wished he would come back even if all you'd do is want him gone, the fear of mourning his absence and renouncing the crime done on your father with it. Mourning his absence anyway.

The memories of him.

The way he smiled, hidden and quiet, like they were secrets he was trying to keep. The way he slept in the car, hair riding up against the window. The way he laughed (not the kind that makes your belly ache, but just the soft ones that last only shortly), so rare that it surprises you for a moment when he does, but when he does, it sounds like he's exhaling a breath he's held in for a long time.

The way he'd come in front of anything for you.

The way he tried so hard to disappear for you, but it never worked because you always, always noticed him no matter how much you didn't want to.

The way he finally did and nothing ever felt right after.

It's hard to tell when you stopped trying to shove it all down (when it started becoming too hard to), and when you started wanting to believe he had a reason, started wanting to forgive him so you could be free. The way clarity and perspective came in so slow. One thought to another, one feeling to another. It was one of those things that just happened when you were so lost inside your head, you didn't realize that it was happening.

 

**…**

 

One of the hardest things was learning that you still loved him, even if it felt like disloyalty towards your father, even if it felt wrong. You did. And it was like unsticking yourself little by little from all that you've felt and believed for the past ten years, and it was like cutting your heart in two halves so that one could do what the other couldn't. It was painful as fuck.

You're driving on your way to Bobby's in a stolen car because you never came back for your own (and as crappy as this tin can is, it's good to be back in the driver's seat, even if you can't stop feeling like there's too much space around you without him, can't stop feeling the emptiness of the passenger seat sink down your chest).

But the hardest thing was finding out that loving him had not been wrong at all.

You show up at his place without warning, like in 2002 but nothing like it. He opens the door and you're standing there, staring at him, and you're suddenly not sure if you should have come, suddenly feeling small and undeserving of being at his doorstep after three months (not ever calling him, not ever telling him what the hell happened to Sam), feeling ashamed for being here out of your own selfish need.

You still find yourself saying it, even if they're the wrong first words. "I…" you begin, your voice weak and trailing off. You swallow and try harder, sounding stronger and less lost. "I need to know."

He doesn't say anything, doesn't ask what you mean, and there's something unfathomable on his face as he's looking at you, before he silently moves aside, giving you permission to enter his house.

You do.

You do and as you're walking in, there's a lump in your throat at the silent forgiveness for everything that happened, at the very fact that he opened the door for you at all. You sigh shakily, suddenly overcome by a brief paroxysm of emotion and gratitude because you are somehow reminded of everything he has done for you by this one action, all the terrible things he's been there for. You are reminded that he's never abandoned you.

The door closes behind you, and you're staring at Bobby and you can't breathe from the guilt and shame sitting like boulders between your ribs, and you're saying, "Bobby, I'm sorry." And your voice is hoarse and breathless, the words reverberating from your chest.

He looks so tired. He looks so tired all the time, ever since that first time you came to see him in five years. You don't think you've ever seen him look alive since then. The guilt roiling in your stomach intensifies.

"I get it, boy," he says, smiles a little, but he still seems too tired. "I know."

"I'm sorry," is all you can manage again.

"I know," is all he says.

 

**…**

 

"I should have told you. That day, I mean. On the phone."

You're sitting on the couch in the library, and Bobby's sitting on a chair for the desk. There are beer bottles in his hand and yours, and there are so many things to say that you're not sure where to start, so you start with that.

"Yeah, you shoulda'," he agrees, shrugging. "And I was _damn_ pissed at first. Called you a hundred times and you never answered and, uh...well, you know. It's been hell not knowin' all these months. How it happened. It's been hell, but...don't mean I don't get it now. Sam was your brother." He paused, waiting for, maybe even daring, you to deny it. You don't. The words, the past tense that it was said in, hit you hard in the lungs and you suddenly feel a little short of oxygen. Your downward eyes, rooted to your beer bottle, slip to a close, and you watch it happen beneath your eyelids again. "You had to be there when it happened, and that...that couldn't a' been easy."

"I'm going to now, I swear," you promise quietly, gaze landing back up at him. He will be the first person you will tell the whole tale to, and it will be hard, but this is what you owe to the man who stepped up as your father figure when your real one was gone (whether that was for a while or forever).

And so you tell him. You tell Bobby everything that happened that night. You thought about it so much, so many times, and all the details are just ingrained into your brain now, and you tell him as much as you can put it into words.

He looks mournful when you glance up at him after you're done (you can't ever look him in the face telling him that, that the kid he had raised the past ten years died for you, _because_ of you). He takes off his cap and wipes a hand across his eyes as he bows over, sighing deeply and tremulously. But then he looks up at you with a small smile, something a bit like gratitude (perhaps even relief) in his gaze, as if it was liberating to have this certainty and closure. You regret not giving it to him sooner.

He puts his cap back on. "I'm proud a' him," he says. He stops silent for a moment, before he also says, voice quivering a little, "I'm… I'm glad, for, uh, lack of a better word, that it—it wasn' the way I thought it was. "

And you won't ever tell him about the smile that was an apology and a goodbye all at once, the way he acted like he was already dying. You won't tell him about the way his eyes glazed over, begging for something that he couldn't find anywhere here. You won't tell him about the way he couldn't hear you over his desperate reassurances that you sometimes think was for himself too.

 

**…**

 

"He wanted t'go to school," Bobby tells you with a sad, wistful smile. "Stanford. Got a letter of acceptance from there."

"Yeah?" you ask, eyebrows raised, impressed. Bobby nods. "So why didn't he go?"

He looks down at his half-finished drink, shrugs. "Take a guess."

That does something terrible to your heart.

"You came," he continues. "And I knew. As soon as he walked in with you, I knew he was goin' to leave with you too. The way he looked at you, I knew he was goin' to leave it all behind to follow you."

 

**…**

 

You're thinking about it when he tells you about it. Before he does that, he goes into the kitchen and brings a bottle of whiskey in place of a beer, takes a long, hard gulp of it. When he's done, he says, "He told me. The night before you left here."

You still completely at those words, so still that you're not sure if you're even breathing.

"He told me why he did it."

You exhale slow and quiet, brow furrowed, unable to believe it. Bobby was the one who was there with him the longest, so you figured he'd have learned something that he never told you about that reason, even if not all of it. You thought you would come here and find bits and pieces of truth and half-answers that wouldn't be based on anything solid. You were ready to take it, to fill in the gaps with uncertain theories and merely surface observations that you'd have to dig deep into to find that reason, to find your freedom in them. But instead you'll have whole truths, and you're not sure if you're ready for this.

"And you know what? I.." He cuts himself off, mouth working as if he's about to say something he shouldn't, and he shakes his head sorrowfully. "I think he had every goddamn reason in the world t'do it."

It rubs at the rawness inside of you, the one still reserved for your father. But you force down your anger and emotions because you don't know what he means yet.

But then he tells you and you know and you wish you never came back here looking for answers. You wish you could go back to not knowing because the pain of it must have been easier than knowing this. You want to believe that it's a lie, trade your faiths in, but you don't feel it, because Sam would never lie like this. Your mind fights for explanations, the most ridiculous and unlikely thoughts shot down immediately by logic and sense, and yet, you still find yourself desperate to believe them.

But there was nothing that could explain this, the truth laid out before you in blatant, crystallized words. Sam would never lie like this.

And you could imagine him, as Bobby's telling you all of this, lying on his bed upstairs, drunken lifelong sorrow and red eyes glassy with more than intoxication and bruises of your fists ( _your_ fists, god, yours) like smudged ink on his face (like when you saw him that day in the kitchen). Could imagine him crying as he told Bobby in broken slurs and broken sobs about all the men John let into their motel room, touch him in horrible ways for easy money, to make him pay for a sin that he was too young to commit (just for being in a crib his mother died over), about the way he drank too much and hurt too much when he did in those six months he sent you away ( _you need to let him grow up and he needs to become a better hunter, so I'm takin' over his training_ , he said. You remember that's what he said and you fought him over it and he said, _that's an order, boy. Don't make me keep you away longer_ and you couldn't couldn't _couldn't_ say anything back).

About the day you came on May 2nd, Sammy's twelfth birthday, the happiest you had been in all those six months (you loved being with Bobby but you couldn't bear being away from him). You came back and he hugged you too hard and he held your hand in a way he hadn't since he was eight, smiling on cut lips and staring at you as if you'd been gone six years instead of six months.

You asked him about the bruises on his face and he said, "Shapeshifter, Dean. A few days back." And you believed him because there was nothing else to believe other than that.

And when John tried to send you away again for another six months, one whole year, you refused, stood your ground this time even when he used the same words against you as the ones before. He didn't like that. You were frustrated and angry and he was frustrated and angry and he grabbed you by the collar and shoved you hard against the wall.

Sam was there.

And he'd always come in front of anything for you.

Sam came in front of him for you and shoved him back and you would have never known how scared he was of that man.

You could imagine him, lying on that bed, drunken lifelong sorrow and glassy red eyes and broken words, telling Bobby about what happened after he picked you up and you left with him in his truck because that's what Sam told you to do (to get you far away from him, you realize now). Telling him about how it terrified him, seeing that happen, terrified him more than he was terrified of him, and it angered him, and so he confronted him and he pushed too far when John was drinking too much.

_I knew I shouldn't have. I knew. I knew I knew I knew—_

_Just a stupid kid who—who got too scared and angry—_

_Tried to stand up to him for someone worth more._

_He was drunk and there was a knife in his hand—_

Telling Bobby about how he tried to get away from him, got cornered when John came between the door and him. He grabbed John's own gun from under the pillows of his bed and pointed it in his face ( _I wasn't going to, I swear. I just wanted him to stop_ ).

But it didn't work because John didn't believe he would pull that trigger and he kept coming and coming and coming—

And Sam shot him.

And you could imagine him, lying on that bed, begging Bobby to never tell you about this.

_He'd never believe me. You know he won't. Not after what I did._

Could imagine him saying, _I just wanted someone to understand that—that I didn't mean to._

That's what Bobby told you. That was what he said. You broke him that third May (and maybe it was meant to be you anyway because nobody else could have done it worse) and he came back here with all these secrets spilling out of the cracks of him, these secrets that became too big to keep inside any longer.

Could imagine him apologizing for everything that wasn't his fault as he hung on the edge of sleep, voice soft and weary and thick with bitter salt tears in his throat.

_I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry—_

And maybe you get it now, that need for peace inside his eyes and inside of him. You get it if there are secrets like those inside of him too.

The hardest thing, indeed, was finding out that loving him had been right.

 

**…**

 

Before you leave, he takes you to the salvage yard.

"Fixed her up for ya," Bobby says.

You're staring at the car that's supposed to feel like home but you feel nothing.

Before you leave, Bobby holds out a little thing, black cords and golden-horned trinket. Says, "He left this behind with me a few years back. I guess you should hold on to it."

Fingers reach up and take it, takes you a few seconds to realize they're your own (your own hands not feeling like your hands, your body not feeling like your body). You're staring at it, forget what you're supposed to do with it for moment.

You find yourself sitting in the car somehow, on leather seats that feel strange instead of familiar now. There's a warmth on your shoulder and you glance up and the world looks like something you haven't seen before. Bobby's there outside your window, hand still on your shoulder, asks if you want to stay a few days here (doesn't ask if you're going to be okay). Somebody says, "no, it's...it's fine." Takes you a few seconds to realize again that that was you.

You find yourself again from one moment to another without knowing how you got to it, everything in-between a blur, and you're driving down roads that don't feel like the same roads you've known all your life.

Everything is flipped and upside down and you just keep driving on and on and on, no idea where you'll end up at the end of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To any and all John Winchester fans reading this:
> 
> At the time I had planned this story out, I was mostly neutral towards his character, and didn't quite understand him as well, hence there wasn't any fixed image that I had of him, and so I didn't have any qualms against writing him like this. However, after seeing and reading a lot of character analyses on him, I do understand him better now, and I actually admire him (to people who are anti-John, you have your ideas of him and I have mine, so please respect this). He had his shortcomings as a parent and a human being, as they all do, but he still did the best he could in his situation and loved them to bits, and I believe often people simplify his conditions too much when it's not as simple. What I mean to say is, now that I know him better (or at least, the John we saw for ourselves in season one), I cannot even imagine him raise a hand on his children nor emotionally abuse them (some might say he neglected them, but I think I've read somewhere that canonically, he's often only ever left them for a few days at most and always gave them enough money for food in that duration), let alone the horrors mentioned. This was so awfully difficult to write after that. I am so obviously butchering his characterization for the sake of the story, and it may seem absurd to some, but I truly feel guilty for it. For a time after, I started worrying a lot about this, and wanted to try and find alternatives for the 'reason' because, as I've said, I couldn't imagine it myself. But alas, I couldn't. Every alternative I came up with didn't seem to fit after the story was already written, and they all seemed far too underwhelming for Sam to have never told anyone about it for ten whole years. I want to offer my sincerest apologies for this to all those who like John as I do.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: mild implications of past abuse

Your body grieves before the rest of you does.

You drive all day on highways with no destination in mind, wandering aimlessly from state to state. You stop at gas stations for fuel and you stop at nights when you get too tired, sleep in the car or in a bed (you still ask for two queens and you don't know why), check in for one night and leave the next morning. Never stay in a place longer than that. You stop at bars sometimes and get drunk until everything's even more dimmer and hazier than it already is. People look at you like you're something to keep away from or something lost (it is now that you're starting to realize that you've never really found a place that stuck with you other than the one with Sammy, and you think you've never really been home since Sam's twelfth birthday).

Maybe it's more like floating around though. Not feeling anything. Not aware of anything you're thinking. Roaming from one place to another mindlessly like a ghost that doesn't know it's dead. You float around and you bounce off places like a balloon in the wind with its string cut off, going nowhere and everywhere.

And then.

And then you can't _breathe_ , and you're choking on nothing. You're stopping the car over to the side of the road, fumbling for the door and pushing it open and falling out on your knees, heaving with sobs and lack of air and crying so hard that your muscles are seized up and shaking and you can't understand it when you're not feeling a fucking _thing_.

But then your heart and mind catch up and you're feeling. You're feeling too much, all at once, and it's the most horrible thing you've ever felt (and you had once thought that losing that— _that_ fucking man was the worst thing you've felt but it's this. It's this). You're feeling it all, your insides convulsing from the agony and sickness, and your heart is pounding because you're suddenly being assaulted by thoughts and images of _Sam_ —god, Sammy, fucking _Sammy_ , only twelve and too scrawny to look like it (just a kid, just a fucking kid). Eyes still too big and crescent moons in his cheeks and bruises too dark on his face, and the way he said (so convincingly that he almost seemed to believe those lies himself when he was telling him) when you asked where he got them from, _Shapeshifter, Dean. A few days back_. And you touched his face and angled it for a better look and said, _fucking bastard_. And he laughed and said, _Dean, I'm okay. I killed it_.

And you said, _guess Dad's training you well, huh?_

And you didn't know. You didn't know. It makes you so fucking angry and so sick that you're gagging again between sobs, your stomach spasming, your throat closed up and tight. Your hand comes up to grasp at your shirt and skin, where your heart lurches excruciatingly behind it, and you think it might start bleeding if it scrunches up any more than this.

You're curling away on your side against the car, one arm braced against it, and the other goes down tremulously to clutch at the place where it's all twisting up painfully into explosions inside of you with every thought and image of Sammy (innocent and wide-eyed and so fucking sad and broken on the inside but you never knew. You never knew), leaving you gasping and choking again on the weight in your throat like there's a tight noose around your neck.

And you're thinking about the way he whimpered and begged in his sleep, pushed against the monsters over him in his dreams to make them stop. You're thinking about the way the little light and aliveness left inside of him faded out of his eyes whenever someone mentioned John. You're thinking about the way he pleaded, _I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry_ on that third May (when you had fucking hurt him, bruised and bloodied him the same way that man had once did) and never seemed to stop shaking after (too little and controlled to be easily noticed but you always noticed him) whenever you were in the same room as him.

(God, it was all right in front of you and you never asked. Maybe if you had just asked).

 _Sammy_. Fucking _Sammy_ who's dead and gone and you can't tell him how sorry you are and how much you still still _still_ fucking love him so damn much that it slams the air out of your lungs, devours you from the inside out and throbs in your veins all over.

And this car that you're leaning against, this car that you've been travelling all over in, this car you've made your home, this car you were so fond of because it was that bastard's.

It disgusts you now, and it makes you so fucking enraged that you're grinding your jaw until it hurts, wheezing heavily through the snarl bent around your clenched teeth, your insides and nerves chafed and burning white-hot. Your fist collides vehemently against the car, tears running down your cheeks. And then it collides against the car again, over and over and over, strangled cries of fury ripping out of your body. _This_ car. _This_ fucking car, the last thing that he left behind that you foolishly cherished. _This_ car that fucking belonged to that son of a bitch, who is dead too and who you can't hurt for Sammy anymore for all the shit he's done to him, who made you hurt the wrong boy for the wrong man (but that was all you too). This car that held fucking shadows of him.

And this car that held memories of _Sam_.

This car, these empty leather seats (always, always so empty and big without him). This irreplaceable place that was touched by memories of Sammy, the ghosts of the moments he lived with you, that you can take with you wherever you go.

This is where he breathed, where he smiled like kept secrets and laughed like he was breathing again after a long time, even if it was the rarest thing (there was a time, before the worst, when it wasn't. It wasn't rare and it was careless). This is where he used to sleep against the window with rock tunes strumming lowly from the radios (where he once used to sleep sidled up to your side in the backseat). This is where he looked bright and mellow when the shine of the sunset caught in his hair, framed his cheekbones and sweetened him and made the hazel of his eyes lighter into golden. This is where he smelt like coffee and aftershave and girly flowery shampoo, like gunpowder and ashes and dirt. This is where he put his fingers against your skin around the wounds, patched them all up and whispered softly to you, his voice like husky pledges and tender solace. This is where Sammy took little pieces of you with every moment, just by being there, just by being Sammy (and you never let yourself notice).

Your hands are shaking with sorrow and pain, tumid and bloodied, and your heart's still pounding against your chest. Something wrenches inside of you, remembering these things about him, feeling this mix of love (so fucking much of it) and grief (for losing him too soon, for that chance you'll never have to fix things and love him and say all the things you want to say) and greediness (for more of him, for more time, more remembrances of him) and regret (for taking it all for granted, for not doing better).

"Baby, I'm sorry," you murmur huskily, taste salt on your lips, and you sniff hard as you run your trembling, aching hand over the dented metal. You reach up with your other hand and wipe at your cheeks with your fingers, trap your quivering lips between your teeth.

This car is yours and Sammy's. Your home and Sammy's home. And maybe John bought it and owned it once but that was a long time ago, because this is now marked with whispers of Sammy's scent and yours, his fingerprints and yours, his sweat and blood-stains and yours, the sounds of his quiet laughter and pictures of sunshine falling over him, woven around his body like light curving over hills, his eyes full of luster and gold. It's marked with breaths and touches of his life and yours.

 

**…**

 

You dig him an empty grave next to your mom's in Lawrence, Kansas (you promised you'd never come back here, but just this once, you had to break it for him). You press your fingers tenderly against the stone, your heart swollen and raw against the inside of your sternum, and you whisper, "I hope you're at peace now, Sammy."

 

**…**

 

**October 2005**

 

"Here, right now, when it doesn't seem to matter... you'll never think about how much you're gonna regret it all. But the truth is, kid... the truth is that, god forbid, if it ever becomes too late for you, it's going to be all you can think about, every moment you can still remember hurting him. So I'm tellin' you now. Don't make the same mistakes I did, and especially not for something like this."

Some part of you instantly regrets telling some strange kid these things, telling him Sammy's story (minus the dirty, gritty parts). These are not really things you say to a twelve-to-thirteen year old boy, and you don't project all of your own issues on the kid either, especially when this was nothing like you and Sam, too normal to ever come close.

But you look at him and he seems to understand what you mean. And maybe that's why you told him these things, because somehow you knew that he was the kind of kid who would.

The kid inhales quietly, stares down at his deflated ball.

"I guess… well, I _know_ I've been too hard on him. And honestly, I… maybe it's not even really anything to do with him, y'know?"

"Then what's it got to do with?"

He doesn't answer right away. He lifts his head and looks at the little boy he isn't willing to call his brother yet, before his gaze lowers down again to his hands, open beneath the flat ball held only by the side of his palms.

"It's always been me and my parents. And he just…"

He wanes off, doesn't say more but he doesn't have to say any more because you get it.

"Let me tell you somethin', kid. Your parents are going to love him and they are still going to love you, alright? Just as much as they did before. They can because their hearts are big enough for the both of you. And s'not like it's halved or whatever just because another child came in the picture. Yeah, maybe they won't be able to focus on only you anymore, but that's what happens. You win some, you lose some. You got a baby brother here who—who already _adores_ you enough to be freaking _heartbroken_ over you. Wants nothing but a family and _you_ to consider him a part of it. _That_ is a win." You lean close, hold your stare, and you point at the little boy now staring sadly down at his hands in his lap. "Now you look at him and you tell me if that kid's upset because you yelled at him over something stupid or because there's something more going on there."

He exhales and raises his head to look at his adopted brother. Something akin to guilt flashes across his face.

"And look, I'm not saying it's all gonna be easy, like—like rainbows and sunshine or whatever. He's going to break your stuff and get you in trouble and—and just generally be a pain in the ass. That's what little brothers do." You smile, and all you can think about is Sammy. "But he's also goin' to look at you like you're his hero and he's also going to do _anything_ for you. That's what little brothers do too."

The boy is staring at you now, contemplative and quiet. You hold his gaze, waiting for him to say something.

He does. He says, "I'm Wally." Soft voice and a light flicker on his lips, and you know it got through. The kid might be a bit older than you think, even if not in age.

"Dean," you say, smile back at him. "And the little guy over there?"

Wally glances over at his brother. He looks back at you and says, "Sammy."

You stop still for a short moment at that.

_Sammy._

There is a grin gracing your face, slow and soft, at the name. _Sammy_. Sammy like stupid, wavy brown hair and fox-slanted sunflower eyes, perfectly-lined incisors and furtive smiles.

"Sammy, huh?" you say, still smiling that soft smile. Your hands go in your pockets, and you duck your head a little to hide it. Your mouth shrugs with your shoulders. "He looks like a Sammy. So Wally, you gonna go talk to your little brother?"

Wally nods, half-smiles. "I guess so."

You stay and wait around long enough to watch as Wally goes up to his brother. He glances back at you for a second and you throw him an encouraging thumbs up. His mouth twitches, and then he turns back around hesitantly, starts talking, can't seem to look up from his sneakers. Sammy's staring up at him, some kind of hopefulness in his gaze, his eyes less droopy with sadness.

After a while, when Wally's done talking, Sammy's mouth breaks out into a small smile. Wally jerks his head over and the little kid stands up, follows him to wherever (you stop watching there because you're remembering your own Sammy again, and the way he followed _you_ everywhere, all chubby and short up to your waist, and you're remembering the way his head had to tilt up completely to grin at you, huge eyes crinkling and small teeth he still hadn't grown into and dimples in his chipmunk cheeks and fluffy chocolate curls falling all over, chin against your stomach as he hugged you. Your stomach clenches and your heart feels too big and soft and light inside your chest, aches a little from the sorrow and love melding together until you can't tell which is which anymore, like it always does now whenever you think about him).

You get into the car, into the driver's seat, a smile tugging at your lips. You're thinking about things you stopped believing in too young, decades ago (maybe you stopped for a good reason anyway, you think, because Sammy prayed and his life was still the worst fucking tragedy. Still died feeling alone in this godforsaken planet). Things like signs and heaven, like how maybe there is something more than people just floating around in an accidental life. Something that leads you to a boy named Wally who was making the same mistakes you did (even if they'll never be as bad as yours) with a little brother who shared the same name as your own.

And it's stupid, really, if you examine it with less emotions and more rationality. It probably doesn't even mean anything because there are a lot of Sammys in this world and not every one of them will come along to you as some kind of divine assurance, but you lost _your_ Sammy so maybe you deserve to be a little irrational.

And some part of you knows where it's all coming from. You just want to take this and believe that Sammy's okay, wherever he is. That he's happy in a way he's never been here. You just don't want to go the rest of your life being afraid that he isn't, that the only place he still exists now is in memories, and that that day in the car was the last you'll ever see of him (the thought of never getting to _tell_ him makes your heart sick).

You've never believed in a heaven, but you would like to now, for the sake of your sanity. Because maybe there is a place out there where all the good people, people like Sammy, go. Maybe he is there in that place with the mom he never knew and he is happy and someday you will be there with him too if you're forgiven by whatever is out there that forgives people like you, that takes people like Sammy and finally, _finally_ gives them peace. The world is cruel and cold (you've learned that through your life, and you've learned that through the life of the boy you loved more than anything), but it can't be so cruel and cold that you don't ever get to see Sammy again.

This is the hope that overwhelms your whole being, and your hand reaches up to your chest, clasping around the amulet, the solace of it heavy on your palm. You're remembering that Christmas again, and if you close your eyes, you can see it happen as if it's happening right now. See an eight-year old Sammy alive and smiling (tinged with the slightest sadness), his fingers holding the wrapped newspaper out to you (your chest aches again to the throb of your veins).

You look over at the passenger seat, and for the first time in months, your heart doesn't feel like it's drowning in water. You're breathing fine and easy, a seamless transition of inhale to exhale, inhale to exhale, inhale to exhale. The space behind your ribs expand (with the hope that someday you will see Sammy again, somewhere far from and beyond this wretched world) as you lean back and chase the stretch of the horizon. Just for this moment, the air in your lungs is not too much of a burden to carry.


	11. Chapter 11

**November 2005**

 

"I know something you don't," the demon sing-songs.

"Well, hell. I don't know about that, but you wanna know something you already should?" You smirk cockily, lean right into the face of the tied-up skank. "I don't give a fuck."

"Oh, I think you do, Winchester," she says, smirking back. "I'll give you a clue, if it'll interest you." She tilts forward, breathes on your mouth as she whispers, "It's about Sam."

That makes you pause. That name always does.

There is a sense creeping up your shoulders, telling you that if you proceed, there is no going back. Some part of you thinks it'd be better to not hear it.

You listen to the other part that's willing to hear anything about Sam.

"And what is it that I don't know about Sam?"

The demon grins, self-satisfied. "How about this? You let me go, and I'll tell you. Everyone's happy."

You sigh, rolling your eyes. "How about this? You're a lying whore, and you're not going anywhere except back where you came from." You push away from her and begin the exorcism. "Exorcizamus te…"

"Lucifer, you're so boring," she groans, winces. "I thought you'd be a little more curious."

"...omnis satanica potestas…"

"Oh, fine!" she says, rolling her eyes sarcastically. There's a twitch of pain in her mouth, and she writhes a little in the ropes, her breathing slightly heavier. "If you want to know...so badly. Sammy's alive."

She flashes her teeth, red-stained lips wide, when you stop.

"Right," you say. "Like I'll believe that."

"It's true. You're just discriminating, but we told you the truth before, didn't we?"

"Bitch, I was there. I saw the car go off. Heard the fucking explosion too," you snarl. Your chest throbs again.

"We were there too. We saved him by the orders of our master," she says, smiles reverently. "Master sent his best demons to get him out. He isn't supposed to have favorites, you know? But Sam. Sam, he thinks, is going to be the one. The best and the strongest of them all. He already refers to him as the future Boy King. Saved his life like he never did for the others before."

 _What others?_ you should be asking. _Favorites? Future Boy King? Best in what?_ You're so fucking confused, but it's only background.

And all you ask is, "Where's Sam?"

"Let me out."

"Tell me, and we'll talk."

She stopped, mock-considered with a tilt of her head. "Do you promise?" she pouted, and something tells you she's just playing around.

You nod.

"Alright then. We zapped him to Lincoln, Nebraska. Bryan Medical Center West Campus."

You want to believe it's true so goddamned badly. Just once more. You hope the demons are telling the truth once more.

"Why the hell would you tell me this?" you ask, trying not to tremble in your voice, your knees, your whole body. Your heart is slamming against the back of your sternum as if trying to break it, pounding in your ears, and you're breathing too shallowly, too fast. All you can think about is Sam and this new buzz of hope alight and warm in your bones and chest and that _chance_ (that you thought you would spend your whole life craving so much that the hunger of it will eventually kill you one way or another) to do things right this time.

But everything's too easy. This whole thing's been too easy. The hunt. The interrogation.

She says, with that fucking smirk back on her bloodied lips, "You'll know when you get there."

You send her to hell, but she didn't really seem afraid.

 

**…**

 

You get into the car, thunder raging in your body. The engine rumbles, your boot shoving down on the gas pedal, and you haul out of there.

Your hands are wrapped tight around the curve of the steering wheel, the bumps of your knuckles whitened. You're thinking about Sam, about getting to see him again (if it's all really true), and your veins are thrumming and your stomach is gnawing, overwrought with nervousness and exhilaration.

Assuming she was telling the truth (and you're praying for the first time since you were four that she was, _please_. Everything out there that's listening, please), Sam is not alright even if he's alive. You know this much. Because it's been six months and he's still in the hospital.

But it means there is a chance. That chance to fix things, to do better, to tell him everything you want him to know. There is still life in his body and that means that there's still a goddamn chance in this world for him to be okay and for you to do everything right again.

And it's stupid, you know that. Breaking all speed limits on your way to Nebraska on the word of a demon, but you can't bring yourself to care because it's _Sam_. It's Sam and maybe by some unlikely miracle, she was telling the truth. You can't not make sure, because it will bother you forever. You know that you'll always wonder if you'd have found him alive there if you don't find out now.

And you may be driving thirteen hours from Utah right into some trap set up for you, but you have to _know_. You have to know if he'll be alive in that hospital and you _want_ to see him there so fucking badly that it's making you sick and aching in your stomach and your heart and your veins.

You just want to see him sitting in the passenger seat again, in the untouched twin bed beside yours, in the booth that's always vacant in front of you. You just want to see him close and right _there_ , whenever you look beside you again. You want to hear him talk again, and not just about the hunt or the victims or the monster, but about things like some stupid-ass joke he heard somewhere or how good his girly double vanilla frappuccino tastes or how fucking weird that waitress with the funny hair looked at him (maybe even about how damn sad he is all the time and what you could do to make him happy again).

You want to see him smile, blinding and bright, bleached-white teeth unashamedly wide and bracketed by lunette lines. Laugh like something inside of him is weightless and free (the way he used to before it all, before those horrible six months, before you left and you never really came back). You want to see him under the sunshine again, see alchemy happen in his eyes.

You just want this gaping hole inside of you to close up, the one where he's supposed to fit. There's always this feeling now like something in you had been split in two, and you wonder if one half of it fell off the cliff alongside Sammy in that car.

You just want to be able to think about him as if he's alive because he _is_. Stop using past tenses whenever you talk about him (babble about him to bartenders like some fucking jackass).

You just want Sammy, here in this world that ruined him, but here with _you_ (and maybe you were once a part of this world that ruined him, but you promise that you'll put him back together, all the places that are shredded inside of him. You'll put him all back together if they just gave him back to you, even if there'd be so much torn up in him that you might not know where to start. You'll do better by him from now on if they just gave him back).

 

**...**

 

You drive thirteen hours straight (save for a few stops at the gas station and a diner for coffee), running on nothing but an hour of sleep (can't sleep when you still see that car go off the cliff behind your closed eyes or see images of Sam, bleeding and broken on the ground, and you can't fucking reach him no matter how hard and fast you're running to him) and caffeine. Every bit of distance in between, every second of time, is a nuisance that you want to cross over. You feel like you're fighting against a tidal wave, trying to push back but all it does is throw you around and fall right through you.

The thunder still raging in your body is swallowing you up from the inside, the uncertainty and the impatient anticipation and the fear (that this was all just pointless and you won't see him there, alive and breathing and whole. It rattles in your ribs to think about it because now you've started hoping too much in a way you never do, even though it's dumb as fuck to).

Your heart jolts when you see the white building with the blue _Bryan Medical Center_ board, innards folding in on themselves tightly. You came here once, to Lincoln. Two months ago, maybe. And maybe you passed by this hospital, by _Sammy_ , never knowing that someday you'll come back here in desperate hopes of _seeing_ him again.

As soon as the car pulls over and stops, you turn the key and hurl your door open and slide out, and you run.

 

**…**

 

It's only when you're inside that you suddenly realize the vastitude, the significance, of it. The vastitude and the significance and how too good it is to ever be true, to ever be the truth when it came in a demon's words.

You feel like an idiot, just like you knew you would, but ignored because if there was even a snowball's chance to have him back, see him again… you think you would have crossed seas to take it. You would have.

But you drove all the way here on the words of a fucking _demon_. Demons who only tell the truth (nitpicked pieces of it, at least) if it'll make things worse than any lie can. Demons who have no qualms about lying just to fuck with you.

The fatigue is setting in, and you're thinking about turning back around to leave, get in the car and find a bar (and go back to babbling about him in past tenses to bartenders like some fucking jackass). Drive until you get lost (but people only get lost if they have somewhere to go back to. You've only ever had a someone).

Go back to living that empty life that you've stopped wanting too long ago. Go back to living out what little there is of it until you see him again, if there really is a place where all the good people go (but maybe you're not one of them after all the wrong you've done to the best one there was).

Go back to living out the rest of that empty life without _Sam_. Without getting any chance to tell him all you want him to know now, holding all these words and feelings inside of you until the end. The thought of it still makes your breath catch in your throat sometimes, makes you want to stop breathing at all, right then and there.

But you've hoped too much and you've come this far and—and hell, what's the worse that could happen? So this is some badly planned trap (why they would want to kill you in a hospital, you don't know) and you die here. That wouldn't be the worst thing.

So you're fucking stupid for falling for this brutal hoax.

But god, _god_ , if they're telling the truth… by some unlikely miracle, if they're telling the truth...

"Can I help you, sir?" the receptionist asks from her desk.

You walk over to her, your eyes heavy and itchy from exhaustion. You know you look like shit (and the receptionist's very pretty but it's hard to care right now). You don't know how to ask for him. You don't know if they took some extra precaution and put Sam here under another name, if Sam's here at all. They might have thrown Sam's phone and wallet away before they brought him here so there'd be no way to contact you.

You still say anyway, "Sam Winchester?"

 

**…**

 

She finds no Sam Winchester on her computer, but you tell her that your little brother has long brown hair and he's tall as a yeti, six foot four to be exact, and he's got hazel eyes. Tell her he got into a car accident six months ago. She tells you about a John Doe in ICU 47 that fits that exact description and your heart rattles so hard that you freeze for a brief moment, and then it begins to hammer against your sternum.

Before you go in, the no-bullshit doctor tells you that he's in a coma, and there is very little chance of him ever waking up. He tells you that the first time he was brought here, he barely survived. Too many broken bones (his spine one of them) and too much internal bleeding, including an intracranial hemorrhage due to his grave headwound (the main factor for his comatose state). They had to perform multiple surgeries, resuscitate him six times, he said. The doctor then looks at you like he wants to ask where you've been these past six months, but whatever he sees on your face makes him back down.

Demons only tell the truth if it makes things worse than any lie could, and you're wondering if it would have been better not knowing, not coming here (you're wondering whether it'd be better or not if it really turned out to be Sam in there).

After you hear all these things, and before you go in, you think the answer might be yes.

But then you do go in, and it's horrifying, all these machines and him so lifeless between them, but it's _him_. It's him. It's _his_ fox-slanted eyes and it's _his_ long eyelashes resting on his cheekbones and it's his sloped nose and his bow-shaped mouth and his chestnut hair. There are wires going in and out of his body, and there's a heart monitor beside his bed and an IV in his elbow and a ventilator tube shoved down his throat because he can't fucking breathe on his own anymore, and he's so thin now that his skin and bones seem to stick together, doesn't seem to be a lot between them, but it's _Sammy_.

 

**…**

 

When you're walking into the room, you can't stop looking at him, and you're looking at him as if he's about to disappear any second and you're trying to drink in everything about him before he does, your eyes big and hazy and burning with tears. You're walking slowly towards him as if the ground beneath your feet is made of fragile things, and all of this is an illusion that will fall apart before your eyes if you take a step too hard, this reality like cracks in a shattered glass haphazardly put back together.

You're looking at him. You're looking at _Sammy_. And he's not in pieces at the end of some fucking cliff. He's _here_ , in a hospital bed, and he's not alright, but he's whole and you can see him and you can touch him and maybe, maybe if miracles (you don't care where they come from as long as they give you your little brother back) like these can happen, then maybe there could be other miracles too.

You don't know what you're going to do when you get to him.

But you don't expect yourself to break so thoroughly when you're finally there, staring at him, clear and in full view and right _here_ with _you_. Your face is crumpling and your hand is shooting up to clamp over your mouth, your cold metal ring digging into your lips, stifling the sobs trying to lurch out of you. You collapse down to the bed beside him when the weight of grief and relief wash down on you, buckle your knees, and the throb of sorrow and love all inside of you, inside your ribs, pushes you forward, your trembling hands reaching to grab at his face and your forehead leaning against his forehead and your stinging nose against his nose, your cheeks wet and hot and tight. God. _God_.

"Sammy. God, _Sammy..._ " you're whispering his name as if it's all you can say and think, crying so hard that you can barely get your words out. You gulp down the emotions strangling you, closing your eyes, breathing against him, your heart big and soft and pulsating slowly between your collarbones. His mouth is gaping because of the ventilator tube in his throat, all these machines keeping life in him. Makes him look too saddeningly vulnerable. He's too thin and too young and you want to stand between him and everything to make sure nothing ever hurts him again. "Come back to me. Please come back to me, little brother."

You inhale a shaky breath that ends in a choked, weak gasp, and you lean down to bury your face in his gown, below the electrodes taped to his chest. Mumble promises into his middle, the space between his ribs.

"When you wake up," you mumble, swallowing, tears dripping and soaking. "When you wake up, I'm gonna make things better for you, Sammy. I promise. I promise. I'm gonna make things better for you."


	12. Chapter 12

"Brother?" the nurse asks, smiling kindly as she checks Sam's vitals. There is an air of maternality to her.

"Yeah," you say, putting on your best charming smile, reclined back easily in the chair. Your demeanor wavers when your mind brutally flashes back to a time you always rebutted that fact. "I'm Dean. His name's Sam."

"Martha," she introduces herself. She glances at you, still with that smile. "I'm glad to finally have a name for him. All the nurses keep calling him the cutie in 47. And I'm damn glad to finally see somebody at his side." She strokes her fingers through the kid's hair.

You want to grin, because even in an unconscious state, he manages to make all the older women coo over him.

"He came here with no wallet or phone. No nothing. I kept thinkin' about how worried his family must have been out there, not even knowin' about anything that's goin' on with him," she says quietly. "It's just been so sad, seeing him all alone. Beautiful boy like him."

You swallow hard, gaze dropping down to your hand interlocked with his. You rub your thumb over the back of it, and there's that cramp of sorrow in your chest again (for that fucked up half-a-life in him that he silently suffered, for where it all ended him up at).

The sad truth of these words is that it's been that way far longer than six months.

"Well, I'm here now," you say softly, mostly to him and to yourself. "I'm here." But if Sam doesn't wake up, then he'll never know this. And you wonder if finding him would even matter if he doesn't ever get to know all these things (but then you think it does matter a lot because you still get to see him and touch him and that's more than you ever thought you'd get).

"You are," Martha says agreeably.

She talks hushedly to Sammy, touches his hair and cheeks a lot as she does her job. She raises the covers over his chest a little more after she's done, and she turns to you, leaning against the side of the bed.

"Is it...is it just you and him then?" she asks tentatively.

You smile wryly. "Just me and him."

She nods, mouth tightening into a sympathetic smile.

"If it makes you feel any better, he... he hasn't been completely alone here. I mean… he had me and—well, pretty much all the nurses adore him. Never talked to him or anything, but we have a feeling he's going to be a sweetheart." You chuckle slightly at that. So easy to tell just by looking at him that the kid would give his food to a starving stray dog without a thought. "And one of the men who brought him here...he visits him a few times every month."

Your blood goes cold, your heart freezing along with your body.

_We saved him by the orders of our master._

_Master sent his best demons to get him out._

"Are you okay?"

You blink, looking up at her. She's frowning worriedly at you.

You nod at her. "Yeah, I'm...I'm good."

She stares at you for another moment, concerned, and then leaves after a while with a _see you later_ and a wave that you absent-mindedly return, your innards gnawing at the thought of that demon coming close to him. You know he's not going to hurt him, not after saving his life, not after having every opportunity for six months, but you can't be blamed for not wanting that monster anywhere near Sammy.

You wipe a hand at your mouth, exhaling. You look back at your little brother, still so thin and young and vulnerable. You lift his hand, the one in yours, and press your lips to the joints of his fingers.

 

**…**

 

"Do you know all the complications for a person waking up from a long-term coma?"

The voice startles you, your hand briefly twitching towards the knife hidden in your jacket. Your heart slows back down when you see that it's just Dr. Martin.

Even so, there is a tingling in the back of your neck, in the pit of your stomach. You're staring at the doctor, his abrupt appearance for no reason (he's already come today to check on Sam) and his strange manner of speaking cluing you in that something is wrong. Very, very wrong. Your hand slips to where you keep your small flask of holy water as Dr. Martin comes closer.

"Limb contractures, malnutrition, muscle atrophy, blood clots...etcetera etcetera. Patients often need years of physiotherapy before they are able to function fully again." He smiles, tilts his head. "No need for that splash of holy water, Dean. Points for intuition though."

You jump up from your seat, heart pounding, but the demon raises a hand, flicks his wrists downward, and you feel a force shove you back down into the chair. He stares at you, still smiling calmly. He blinks and his eyes turn yellow.

"What the hell do you want?" you hiss.

"Is that any way to talk to the one who saved your precious Sammy's life?" His voice is rough and whispery, almost sibilant, and there's a wicked gleam permanently etched in his gaze. Nothing like that uptight doctor whose body he's possessing.

"You're not getting him," you snarl. "Whatever plans you have for him—"

"Did you know I encountered your daddy once?" he cuts over you, as if you weren't saying anything at all.

The mention of that fucker is the last thing you expect at this time, and it stupefies you into silence. You glare down angrily, struggling slightly, pointlessly, against the invisible restraints from the edge of the seat.

"Oh, was he messed up in the head," the demon muses, shaking his head with a distant gaze. "Saw it in his eyes. No...what's the right word? Ah, yes, _humanity_. No humanity in his eyes. Lost it all when little Mary died."

He's making a slow half-circle around you, your fiery gaze going sideway cautiously as you catch a glimpse of him in your peripheral vision. The closer he gets to Sam, the more your stomach weighs, tangles up into knots.

"I twisted your daddy's mind up. Too easy with all that mess already inside his noggin." He leans down, close to your ear. "And you know what happens when you twist up an already twisted mind, Dean?" he whispers, a taunting smile coming through his voice. " _Bad_ things. Things like turning his youngest son into a whore." He laughs, and your torso snaps to the side so hard it cracks, screaming through your clenched teeth.

"Don't you fucking dare talking about my brother like that, you son of a bitch!"

"Easy, Dean. Easy. Well, for what it's worth, it wasn't my intention for it all to go that far. That was all your papa's doing." The demon shrugs as he stops next to Sam, watches him for a moment with his hands folded at his back. "Just wanted everybody to turn against him so that I could swoop in, so that it'd be easier to turn him over to our side. Well, didn't entirely go to plan, you see. The one flaw that I had not anticipated was his foolish love for you." His yellow eyes shift to you. "No worries. We still ended up at the right place."

He sees the 'what the fuck you mean by that' on your face and sighs.

"Those two little hikers that drove you to the hospital six months ago? Well, what are the chances you'd get that lucky!"

It takes only a short while to click. "Your demons."

"Bingo. Lucifer, it would have been so damn easy letting you die, Dean-o. Nobody left to come between little Sammy and his potential. But we had to keep you around. Just in case. Just in case things didn't work out the way we wanted it to. Now, how smart was that?"

You finally look at him, eyebrows pinched in confusion. There is a pointedness in his words, but you don't know what he's trying to convey.

"Could you be a little more vague than this, motherfucker?" you sneer, snark and fury.

There is a twitch of annoyance in his features, but he's still mostly reposed.

"Let's have ourselves a deal, boy," he says, grins a little close to maniacal. "I lay my mojo on him, and you can finally see those puppy-dog eyes of his open up for you."

"The catch? Oh wait, let me guess. My life?"

"Well, a bit more than that. How about your soul?"

"Funny. See, I don't have to do anything like that, because Sam's going to wake up on his own. And we're going to come after every last one of you bastards."

"So in denial," he says mock-pitiably. "What? You think if he wakes up, he's going to be fully intact? All right in the head? Come on, Dean. You know better. You heard what the good doc said. After all that, is Sam really going to be the Sam you know? The boy fell almost half a hundred feet from that cliff! It's a fucking miracle he's even alive at all!"

You shift, closing your eyes, swallowing. Your mind searches for a way out of this truth, to hold on to that denial, but now that it's all said aloud, it's too hard to go back.

"So let's say he does wake up, which would be incredible all on its own, and he's mentally whole. What about all that permanent damage to his bones? That fractured spine? Is that the kind of life you want for him after all that crap he's been through?"

You're not dumb enough to not see the emotional manipulation for what it is, but as hard as you could try to convince yourself of the contrary, he is right. You're staring at Sam, and the sight of him and the knowing of everything that's broken in him throttles you.

"I'm not ready to let go of this boy. Oh no. And I suspect neither are you," the yellow-eyed demon whispers. His face twists into a taunting smile. "I'll even let you say your goodbyes to him. Ten minutes."

It's not a mercy, but a mocking. It's far from enough, but if you don't ever get to tell him…

He shrugs his head. "Usually, we give ten years, but not for you. You're a special case. Take it or leave it." He's only saying that because he already knows you're taking it, all right there in your face. Either way, you won't be alive. You take it and you're dead, or you leave it and you're still dead, because he won't have any use for you anymore.

Your fingers tighten around Sammy's, and you can't move your eyes off of him, rooted to his face, soft and smooth and fragile, and he's the boy you still feel oceans of love for. He's too young and too vulnerable and you can't let him be hurt any more.

There isn't much of a choice here when you think about it all.

 

**…**

 

Dr. Martin is shaken up when the yellowed-eyed demon allows him to regain control of his body. He looks around the room, has no idea how he got there, perplexed and frightened.

But as soon as Sam's eyes snap open, as soon as he gasps a huge lungful of air, as soon as he starts choking on the tube in his throat—you got to hand it to him—the man pushes it all aside and completely refocuses on his job.

You. You're so still, can't even feel your chest rise and fall, breaths held in as you just stare at Sam like a dumb fuck because he's _awake_. You're seeing his hazel eyes, open wide with panic, and he's _moving_ , hands frantically scrabbling at his throat, his ribs jouncing fast and high.

The staff are coming in, and you're being pushed out, and you're left staring at the closed door. You can't wrap your head around what you've done, and you can't wrap your head around what's happening, that it worked, that deal with the devil you made. It makes your stomach lurch nauseously, full with the terror of what's awaiting you down below, in nothing more than ten minutes.

But you're thinking about Sammy, and how he's breathing on his own now and how he'll be able to move all of his body and how he won't need years of physiotherapy to do the most basic things, and how he'll still get to be the Sam he's always been, get that other chance for the better life he deserved. Move on from that fucked up half-a-life that he lived.

The doctor comes out of the room along with the nurses a while later. But then his eyes flash yellow again, and he mouths, "Ten minutes."

 

**…**

 

When you walk back in, the clock in the room is ticking louder than it ever has. You look up at it. 5:16pm.

Ten minutes to make up for ten years. Ten minutes to make ten years' worth of mistakes right.

His eyes are closed, lying in bed. There is no breathing tube down his throat anymore (you loathed that thing), replaced instead with a nasal cannula. His head shifts the slightest bit, too worn to move too much, and your stomach twists when you look at him, too soft and young and frail, thin and tired like this. There is an undercurrent of finality in every second you watch him, knowing that you will never see him again. It was sickeningly cruel, how you lost him before, knew that very same thing, and then you got him back only to lose him all over again.

You amble up to him, slow and hushed steps in the delicacy of the silent ambiance, until you're standing over him. He doesn't notice you're there.

You're gazing down at him, and there is a mournful weariness in his face, just on the edge of twisting up in tears, but held still by heavy fatigue. He looks tired and sad and like he never really wanted to wake up at all.

You look back at the clock, your throat clogging.

You lower yourself down carefully on the bed with him, and his eyebrows twitch slightly because of the sudden dip of weight next to him, as if disturbed from nearly falling into slumber.

You grab him by the biceps, haul him up into your arms, cautious of the wires, and you lay his head against your shoulder and cradle him close, bony spinal bumps and shoulder blades spiking into your forearms (makes you feel like you're holding a child and it shrivels up your heart). The soreness from whispers of his ruined body forces a pained noise to emit from his throat, and he jerks a bit against your chest, forehead pinched in confusion.

"Sammy, open up your eyes for me," you mumble, put your hand on the underside of his jaw and tilt his face up. "Some stuff we gotta talk about, yeah?"

He doesn't listen (never does, does he?), hair pushing up against your collarbone, his head heavy in your hand.

"Hey. Hey, come on. No sleeping. I just—I just need ten minutes, alright?" you say, shaking his face, laugh softly through the tears burning in your eyes. "Your lazy ass has been sleepin' six months anyway."

His eyebrows raise diminutively in effort, and he manages to open his eyes half-mast, up at you, and there is a short period where he tries to focus in on you before there's a shadow of recognition dawning in a slow, light blink of his eyes. His mouth flickers into a weak, tentative smile.

This is your only heaven now, sins like yours. This is your only heaven. Sammy in your arms, looking up at you (the way he used to when he still followed you around everywhere because he wanted to be just like you, hugged your waist as he grinned up at you), skin and bones and nasal cannula breathing into him but alive and alright and whole, and some day he's going to be the kind of happy he's never been before.

You're looking at him and the finality, the realization of it, jarrs your sold soul. You choke back your tears, press a kiss to his hairline.

The clock is reading 5:17.

"Sammy, I know, okay?" you whisper. "I know."

He blinks confusedly, faint lines in his forehead.

"What—what he did. What he let them all do." You swallow and stroke your fingers through his hair. "I know."

The first few seconds, he's puzzled in the haze of his exhaustion. Then there's comprehension. Then there's disbelief. Then there's terror, breaths beginning to shallow and race rapidly, tears gathering in his eyes, mouth scrunching up vaguely (too tired to do any more), body twisting feebly to try and curl away from you, get away in whatever way he can. The heart monitor starts to beep loudly in alarm, heart rate picking up.

"Sammy, no! God, just—just listen to me for a second, huh? Just listen to me," you're saying, pleading, clutching at his face and trying so hard to smile at him, calm him down, your vision blurred and hot. He shakes his head weakly, tears running down his cheeks, breathing light and fast, his loose fists pushing into you. He tries to hurl himself away with more energy than he should have (still doesn't get as far though), but you grab him hard and pull him up and in even more tightly, bend your head down to bury it into the side of his neck. Murmur through your rough, thickened voice, "Sammy, please. Please, god. Please, just listen. Listen to me, alright?"

The ticking clock corrodes away precious time. By the time anyone arrives, the Holter monitor's quieter. He's not struggling anymore, whether out of fatigue or resignation or having eased down by your voice (it always soothed him, and it makes you sad to think about denying him that solace all these years whenever he fought those monsters in his dreams), his loosely folded fingers trembling above your hip.

"Sammy, I...fuck. I…" Your voice is breaking and wobbling, and you don't know where to even begin. Your face is still pressed into his warm neck, in the curve of it, his pulse beating into your cheek (alive, alive, _alive_ ). "I'm sorry," is what you softly settle on. "I'm sorry. I'm just—I'm so...so fucking sorry." It ends in a strangled, forlorn gasp that makes you feel too pathetic, but you can't care enough right now, your fingers clutching thin flesh and cloth. His breaths shudder in your ears.

You raise your head up, looking down at him, and swipe at your nose, sniffing. You can see that he's trying to stay awake, sore and red-rimmed eyes trying to anchor on you, and his hand is still shaking against your side, now curled into your jacket. His hair comes between your fingers as you run them through it.

Six minutes, the clock tells you.

"Bobby loves you, you know that? I know you think that he's going to look at you like someone less than the kid he raised, but...I was there, when we thought you were gone. I was there, and I saw how broken he was. How tired. And he _hated_ that he never got to tell you that it wasn't your fault. None of it."

Your palm comes to a rest on his nape, tugging his forehead down into the hollow between your neck and shoulder.

"I've had a month's time to ask why you thought you could never tell anyone, little brother." There are tears falling on Sam's cheeks now, but they're not his. "I know you spent all these years thinking that there's something dirty and dark inside of you, and that it doesn't matter what he did anymore, because you think that what you did was worse. And maybe somehow, somewhere along the way after, you started thinking that you deserved those things too." There is a muffled sob into your shoulder. "And I don't know if that's what he fed to you or if in some twisted way in that head of yours, it started makin' sense to you, but you thought I'd never have believed you. That I'd—I'd have chosen him over you or that I'd have thought less of you somehow. And I wish you knew, Sammy, how wrong all that was. I wish you felt like you could have told somebody so that they could have told you that. I'm sorry you didn't. I'm sorry I never asked, that I never made you feel like you could tell _me_."

5:22.

"And Sammy… Sammy, if I had known…" you say huskily, let go of him so you could hold the sides of his jaw, lift his gaze up and gently force him to look at you, frame his face in calloused palms, and he's trying so hard to stay awake, to listen, and his face is vaguely crumpled up again with that lifelong sorrow that you wish you could take away (but there will never be enough time for that now). The tears won't stop dripping. "If I had known, I would have shot him myself."

It's when you say this that it seems to hit the words home, and he's quivering completely now, broken and crying as much as his body allows right now through his exhaustion, all that lifelong sorrow held in it finally pouring out of him, and he won't ever really know. Not really. How it devours you from the inside out, looking at him. And you're suffocating from all the anguish and grief in the room, all the love inside of you, and this ache of the realization that you're never going to get to fulfill that promise you made to him, because you're never going to have that life and that time with him that you thought you would when you first came here. You're never going to be the one to make things better for him, but you know Sammy's strong and you know he's going to be strong enough to do that himself.

"One last thing, Sammy," you're mumbling into the top of his hair, holding the nape of his neck, your voice hoarse and gravelly. "I love you, okay? I love you so damn much. You… you remember that tomorrow. When you—" _When you find out I'm gone_. You swallow, grip him tighter. "You remember that tomorrow and forever." _That's why I did it_. "I love you."

It only breaks the kid more (and you're glad he doesn't ask what you mean, kind of glad he's too tired to), and he's trying to gulp it all down and say it back to you and you're smiling down at him, soft and tight, eyes crinkling. You're rubbing a thumb over the tender space behind his ear and whispering, "It's okay. It's okay. I already know, Sammy. Everything you've done for me…" _From standing up to the man you feared most to leaving behind all your dreams to sacrificing your life for me_. You smile softly, shaking your head. "...you don't ever have to tell me. I already know." And you're drained and dried out but you still can't stop drowning in those oceans of love for him.

5:24. Your innards lurch, scrunching up into themselves in terror.

"And Sammy?" you say, flipping his arm over. You trace the scar line beginning from his wrist with your thumb, say, "This stops, you hear me? Never again. You _promise_ me that."

He's completely burnt out, doesn't move more than his eyes hazily watching your fingers on his scar. There's the barest squeeze by his hand on your knee.

Your eyelashes are growing wet again as you wipe the back of your hand across your eyes, salt water smudging even more. "That's it, Sammy. That's all. You can go to sleep now, little brother."

He does. He lets go as soon as you tell him to, everything of him relaxing wholly against you. Your hand comes around the back of his neck to its side, his pulse against your fingers, and you turn your head and press your lips to his forehead. It's a goodbye and it's an apology, for what you have done (in love and grief and regret), for what he will find tomorrow, for hurting him one last time.

But this is your compensation and your salvation and your penance. This is the depth of your oceans of love for him, and this is the only kind of hurting that you cannot bring yourself to feel remorseful for (guilty, but never remorseful).

You leave the amulet and the Impala keys next to his pillow. Tangle your fingers in his supple, tousled hair and look back at the clock and try not to break when you see the time.

5:25. The second hand is turning towards your end.

You are backing away from the bed, your gaze stuck on his sleeping face, dreamless peace in his cheeks. You're drowning in that love for him again, and it's stealing your air from your lungs and cramping your heart and your stomach, and it's exhausting.

He's the last thing you see and the last thing you think about in this world. Sleeping under white sheets and under the sunshine in the passenger seat, but there in your mind now, the lights are not hollowing out his eyes from the stark shadows around them, but are making the bright sparkles in them brighter. He's laughing with a pretty girl that he's going to marry some day instead of staring sad and lonely out the window, lost in thoughts of his broken past and present, and he's reading nerdy books in a house he owns instead of being hunched over a cracked motel desk of research papers, back curved so outwards at times that it seems like his shoulders are weighing down on his body, and the only monsters he's going to be dealing with are the little rugrats running all around him. He's happy and free and there is no more of that lifelong sorrow dragging him down, that he always carries around on him like wet clothes clinging to his skin.

And when the hand touches your shoulder and begins to suck your life away, and your heart is battering so hard that you think it'll be the thing to kill you first, you're thinking about the things that's going to make this damned eternity of yours worth it, these visions of him, and your gaze never wavers from the boy that has loved you in ways and times nobody else would have.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Blood and torture (not very graphic for the most part, I believe!)

The edge of the demon's knife is dragging down on the muscles on your back, and you're counting each of your sins in your mind with each laceration on your body.

_This is for never asking you more, Sammy._

You're gasping and choking from the agony radiating all over your body, your throat burning and raw.

_This is for not knowing better._

_This is for not being able to keep you safe from them all. From him._

_This is for leaving you, once before and now again._

_This is for all the times I ignored your cries in your sleep._

_This is for all the times I made you think you weren't anything to me._

_This is for all the times I made you feel alone._

_This is for all the words I never should have said._

_This is for all the words I should have said and never did._

_All the things I shouldn't have done and did._

_This is for all the times I wished you'd disappear (though I suppose I paid for that. For six months, I did)._

_This is for the time I became no better than that monster._

The list goes on and on and on.

 

**…**

 

In hell, pain is different. It's deeper, clearer, _worse_.

The knife slices through the spaces between each of your ribs, cuts at your lungs, and you're screaming through your clenched teeth. The black-eyed bitch's whispering through a wild, maniacal grin, "Given up yet?"

"No," you force out, panting heavily.

"I guess we could go on for a few more hours then. We've got all the time in the world, Winchester."

 

**...**

 

The yellow-eyed demon's name, you learn, is Azazel. He is the bastard that dragged your mother up the walls, to the ceiling, and set her on fire. He is the bastard that set into motion a chain of events that led to everything that went wrong in Sammy's life. He is the bastard that visits you every once in a while, tells you all his plans for your baby brother, a gleam of pride and anticipation in his eyes that makes you sick to your carved up stomach.

 _It's going to be him. Your brother. The trials are just a formality. It's going to be him. Sam Winchester, the future Boy King. The harbinger of Hell on Earth_.

You tell him to go fuck himself.

 _It's his destiny, Dean-o. It's all written down in the blueprint of his fate_.

 

**...**

 

The days blur into one long, endless stretch of time here, no skies to transition from day to night to show the passage of time, no sense of the cycle of beginning and ending. It's terrifying.

But when they tell you that you've been here ten whole years, you laugh and laugh and laugh.

There are meat-hooks looping in and out of your sides, your shoulders, your thighs and your calves, and there's the thick scent of sickening copper in your throat, dried blood sticking to your teeth and lips and chin and neck.

But you think you've never felt freer than this (maybe now you've amended yourself, and maybe now you can finally be worthy of Sammy's unfaltering love and absolution).

 

**...**

 

They speak about him. Sam Winchester, the boy looking for perdition. Sam Winchester, the boy favored by Azazel himself. Sam Winchester, the one meant to lead damnation to the world. Sam Winchester, searching out the small population of demons and sending them all back here.

They say he only ever asks one question.

_How do I get my brother out?_

So he knows. He's figured it out. Well, Sammy's always been smart as fuck, so you should have known he would.

But this wasn't what you wanted for him. He should have been living the life you envisioned for him, the dreams you had in mind for him that had made you feel a bit stronger in the face of eternal torment waiting ahead for you. You knew he'd do this if he found out where you went. Throw his life away to get you out of here. That's exactly what he's doing now.

"No. No no no no," you're murmuring, shaking your head. God, you want to get out so fucking bad it makes your stomach turn inside out and your heart hurt, but you want Sammy to live a better life than chasing after a man who'll never be saved, who doesn't deserve to be. "Tell him to stop. Tell him to stop."

You stop when you start choking and coughing on the blood rushing up your throat, in your mouth, your gouged up viscera exposed to the hot air. The demonic bitch laughs.

"Maybe if you get off that rack, we could pass on your message."

 

**...**

 

" _Put him in a little test game, Dean-o. Fight to the death. Winner is the last one standing, the one who gets out and gets to be alive as well as rule the army. And boy oh boy, was baby brother_ ruthless _. When I told him that he'll get to open these gates of Hell. Killed them all, those other children with powers like him. He'll make a fine boy king, he will_."

The gates of Hell open by your fifteenth year, and all hell breaks loose, quaking from the paroxysm of chaos. There is a pandemonium of manic shrieks, smokes of black all around racing for their freedom and escape.

They were opened for _you_.

Sam's voice is distant, muffled echoes of raw screams from outside those gates, calling out your name.

And the sound of Sam's voice is fucking beautiful, like cool balm over your Hellfire-scorched soul, and there are tears running down your bruised eyes and bruised cheeks, mingling with blood and sweat, and you're pulling harder against the hooks ripping apart your body than you ever have, your stomach heating up with renewed energy and strength.

You think you may have forgotten how to say anything but his name in that moment.

_Sammy, Sammy, Sammy..._

_I'm here, Sammy. I'm right here_.

And then you can't hear his voice anymore.

 

**...**

 

On your twentieth year, it is announced, "Master Azazel is dead!"

Word reaches around. At _the hands of the boy who was to bring everlasting flames on Earth_ , they say.

She cuts her knife into you again. Same old tricks, but it still makes your throat raw from screaming. She snarls, "He said, free my brother, and I'll join you. Master Azazel was smarter than that, of course. And we can't let you go until you get off that rack yourself."

And from this day onwards, everything is a little bit worse (a little slower, a little harder, a little longer).

 

**...**

 

"Got a surprise for you, Winchester."

For a moment, you think she removed your lungs again.

There lies before you, the John Winchester himself, in all his fucking glory. Stone-faced as always, but not in the same way. He's emptier and deader. Knock, knock, no answer. Nobody home. He looks like a picturesque little sculpture.

There's a loud, blood-curdling scream of horrible, horrible rage in your ears, your head exploding, your vision russet. You realize it's your own voice echoing back. You feel like the flames of Hell have turned outside in.

" _Let me off_!"

He's not a sculpture, you discover, when you find your fingers digging into his very real flesh. When you rip him apart with your bare hands, John Winchester does not move an inch.

 

**...**

 

The next ten years are a blur of torture tools in your hands, burnt meat and spurts of ruby red and mindless insanity.

 

**...**

 

Four decades later in the pit's time, you open your eyes to darkness and the scent of earth.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!
> 
> So um...this was the most I could come up with for this part. I'm sorry it's so short. I had the whole outline planned out in my head, but in execution, I couldn't make it long enough. I'm sorry about any plot-holes I might not be seeing. I feel there might be a bit of that as it's been a while since I've watched that far back. I've tried to fix what I could using supernatural wikia, but I still feel like there are things I'm not seeing here.
> 
> Obviously, how I've written Hell here is very, very different than how it is portrayed (little as it may be) in canon. For one, Dean would probably not be able to know this much about what's going on out there, but since this is a story solely focused on Dean's P.O.V, I had to tell what was happening out there as well. Also, Azazel may seem to favor Sam a lot more in the story than he really did in canon.
> 
> To be honest, this was a very hard chapter to write. We don't know much about hell from the show, and I'm not creative enough to fill in the open spaces for that :P so I don't know what it would have been like, really. And I erased a lot of torture that might have been extreme because I didn't want to make it graphic, so maybe that makes this chapter seem very underwhelming and under-detailed (also I'm just always rusty because of all the delays in-between so I couldn't think of a lot to write). And it was difficult to fit in the story of what was going on out there with Sam without the 'how and whys' coming up. There are still a few of those. All in all, I do feel like I should have done a lot better with this chapter, but at the same time, I feel like I couldn't do better than this. As a result, it's been sitting there for the past month or so, being edited over and over. Finally, I decided to post this and try to focus on doing better in the next chapter.
> 
> Also, the next one is the last chapter, so I really hope I do it justice!
> 
> Thank you so much for the beautifully supportive comments, the bookmarks, the kudos and simply for taking the time to read my story. It means the world! *hugs*


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: the beginning parts are taken directly from Supernatural, and some lines are similar to those written in the show, although not copied completely.
> 
> Warnings: language, brief mentions of past abuse

 

You're swathed in darkness when you wake up choking and gasping on the gust of cold air rushing down your trachea, coughing hard. You're wheezing, and you feel like you can't breathe, and your heart is pounding hard in your chest.

The first thing you realize is that you're fully clothed, and that there is no pain or heat beyond human imagination, no scent of blood and burnt flesh, and there's a weight pressing against your hip in your pocket, small and metallic-heavy, in the shape of a lighter. You fumble for it, digging it out, flick at it frantically until a small flame forms, and you're still wheezing and you still feel like you can't breathe and you still feel like your chest is about to burst open. Your gaze darts rapidly, breaths jerking with terror when you find yourself confined in a small space. _Coffin_. Fuck.

"Help," you croak out through your panicked wheezing, choking on fear.

" _Help_!" you scream, your voice hoarse and ragged from disuse and lack of air.

 

**...**

 

The surrounding trees are burnt and felled out, and in the center of it all, lies your untouched grave. _Not freaky at all_ , you think, and you're wondering how you're alive and who's responsible (if it's Sam, you fucking swear to god). You glance around, the flood of light blinding your pinched eyes when you lift up your head at the world. _I'm alive_ , you think, feeling your chest rise and fall and your heart batter slightly in your chest. _I'm breathing_ , you think. _I'm out and I don't fucking deserve to be_ , you think.

And then you think of Sam. You think, _I get to see Sammy again_.

Whatever made this happen, it's given you another chance to make things right.

 

**…**

 

In an empty gas station, you roll up your sleeve and break the glass of a fridge, grab a water bottle and guzzle it all down like a man in a desert.

You pick up a newspaper. The top of it tells the date as _18th March, Saturday_.

"March…" You remember the last time you were here, it was November 2005.

 

**…**

 

When you lift up your shirt in front of the bathroom mirror, your skin is clear and untouched. All your old scars from your life are gone, and there are no scars left from your trip downstairs.

When you fold up your sleeve, there is an angry, red hand-shaped mark on your bicep.

 

**…**

 

You're standing at a payphone, putting a coin in and calling Bobby's number. The first number doesn't work. The second one does after a ring.

" _Yeah_?"

"Bobby?"

" _Yeah_?"

"It's me."

" _Who's 'me_?'"

"Dean."

_Beep. Beep. Beep._

You hang up the receiver and call his number again.

" _Who is this_?"

"Bobby, listen to me—"

" _This ain't funny_. _Call again, I'll kill ya_."

The dial tone beeps again.

You hang up the phone, and turn around to find an old, beat-up white truck parked at the far side of the road. Your heart jumps with joy, a grin forming on your face at the sight of it.

 

**…**

 

The door opens, and when Bobby meets your eyes, he stills, shocked and confused and wary. You breathe deeply, your lips twitching into a smile, faint and apprehensive.

"Surprise," you say, light and gruff.

"I...I don't…" he's stammering, panting slightly as if he's having trouble taking in air.

"Yeah, me neither." You step inside, glancing around. You throw your arms open slightly, your gaze landing on him. "But here I am."

When the arm lunges out, silver shining in a blur of movement, your hand instinctively shoots out, wrapping around it. You twist his arm behind him, yelling, "Bobby!" And then there's something hard smashing into your face, takes you a second to realize it was the back of his other fist as you stumble back. "Bobby, it's me!"

"My ass!" he growls, preparing to attack again as he raises his blade, moving towards you.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait!" you yell frantically as you slide the chair between you and him, crouching protectively with one hand keeping the chair firmly in place and the other held out in placation. "Your name is Robert Steven Singer. You became a hunter after your wife got possessed, and... you're about the closest thing I have to a father." When you see his face loosen from a scowl of hostility into awe and shock, his eyes widening and mouth gaping slightly, you slowly straighten up, rasping, "Bobby. It's me."

Bobby shoves the chair aside, making your hand release its grip on it. You hold them both out in surrender, wariness warring with hope in you. He moves closer, placing a gentle hand on your shoulder, before grasping it firmly, as if trying to make sure that you're real.

A smile flickers on his lips, and you try to return it back.

And then he lunges again, slashing the knife at your face. "Woah, woah!" You grab his arm, twist him around as your other arm goes under his armpit and holds him in place. "I'm not a shapeshifter!"

"Then you're a revenant!"

You pull at his grip on the knife, gritting your teeth. The weapon is snatched out of his hand, and you shove him away, arms raised.

"Alright, if I was either...could I do this—" He's watching, tense and alert. You fold your sleeves up until your biceps are visible. "—with a silver knife?"

You exhale a sigh, preparing yourself for the pain of laceration, for the brief resurfacing of memories you don't want to remember. You settle the edge of the knife against your skin and drag it across, blood welling up and flowing down your arm, and a grunt of pain escapes from your throat.

You tilt your head up to him, panting slightly, watch him as the last of his suspicions and fear fade away.

"Dean?" he almost whispers, a thousand emotions bundled up in that one name, in his voice.

You walk slowly towards him. "That's what I've been trying to tell you."

Bobby reaches out, hauls you into a desperate hug, arms squeezing in around your back, one hand on the nape of your neck, and he's breathing hard into your shoulder like he's trying not to break. You blink back your own tears, fisting the back of his shirt.

After a while, you let him go, and he steps back.

"It's...it's good to see you, boy." He smiles, and the look of genuine joy in his eyes tell you how much he means those words.

"Yeah, you too," you whisper, smiling back as your hand comes up to shake his shoulder.

"But...how did you bust out?" he asks. So Bobby knows as well, where you've gone. You wonder who figured it out first.

"I...I don't know." You look off to the side, behind you. "I just, uh...I just woke up in a pine box…" When you turn back, you're met with a splash of holy water over your face.

"...I"m not a demon either, you know."

Bobby shrugs. "Sorry. Can't be too careful."

 

**…**

 

"So tell me. Why the hell was I not worth a goddamn phone call telling me what you were about to do? Why'd ya do it?"

You inhale deeply, your head shaking slightly as you think of how to answer. "There just... wasn't enough time. I had to." You look up at him hesitantly, see the unreadable expression on his face. "Bobby, I...I had to make him okay. I had to give him another chance at life…" Your voice grows more and more desperate the more you talk, the need for him to _understand_ , to not be angry for doing what you had to, overcoming you. "I had to make it up to him, okay?"

"This wasn' the way to do that," he says quietly, staring at you with disbelief and sadness in his eyes. "I mean, goin' to hell? Come on, boy. You can't really believe you deserved any of that."

You don't say anything to that. It's either saying, "well, I did," and you don't feel like arguing about it, or it's saying, "okay," and that would be a lie.

Bobby gets up from the chair, sighing heavily after a while of silence, and walks toward the fridge. When his back is facing you, it makes it a bit easier to bring it up, so you say, "I, uh... I heard some stuff. While I was down there, I mean. About Sam."

There is a pause, in which Bobby stills for a couple of seconds where he's taking a beer out of the fridge. He resumes his movements and asks a little too casually, which means he's trying to figure out how much you know, "Yeah? What kind of stuff exactly?"

"Like visions," you say, blunt and straight to the point. Bobby sits down across the table and slides you a bottle. "Powers. Something to do with Azazel wanting to make him Hell's bitch boy or whatever. Give him a part in some big apocalypse showdown." You thank your lucky stars that fucker's dead now.

He opens up the bottle and takes a swig. He stares down at the table, gathering his thoughts.

And then he begins.

"Well, uh… I'm guessin' you already know there were others like him. Other 'special' children with different powers. 'Far as I know, these powers started showin' up sometime after their twenty-second birthday. You already know why Sam'd be so late to the party. He told me they started for him just about a few hours after he woke up. Felt his head split open and saw some poor bastard dying in a freak accident. Next morning, it's in the news. Same guy. Same freak accident."

You feel kind of sick, thinking of that, of him dealing with something like that alone.

"God… Bobby, tell me you tried to help him."

"I did. When he came to tell me about you… what happened to you... I could see something was wrong, besides the grief of losing the only family he had left, I mean. He was pale, like he was in pain. Tried to make him stay, but...you know how he gets. He tried to tough it out on his own a couple of weeks, but what that kid was going through was too much for anyone to handle, so he showed up at my doorstep one day. Told me he didn't know what to do and where else to go and what was happenin'. He stayed with me most of the next two months, spent a couple of weeks trying to figure out what happened to you 'cause it didn't seem right to him, him coming back and you dying like that… and after he did, just searching for cases involving demons to interrogate and hunt."

Waking up from a six month long coma to find out that things were going to get better, only to wake up the next day and hear that your brother was dead and there was no reason for him to be. That you were having horrific dreams of people dying which were coming true, and then having visions in daylight of the same kind of things. That you were all alone in the world, your past trauma still a shadow over your life on top of it all… you can imagine why it'd be too much for the kid. You're just glad that he had Bobby with him.

"If this never happened, I doubt we'd still be in touch. The way he could barely talk to me the first few days he stayed over, couldn't even look me in the eye. Tried to leave a couple of times, kept saying he was putting too much on me. The dumb kid thought that I didn't see him the same way because of, uh...you know, everything that happened to him." It's subtle, carefully schooled away, but you think you can see the faintest trace of that look on his face, the look people wear when their heart's breaking.

"I tried to tell him that. That you...you know. That nothing changed in the way you saw him." You raise his eyebrows with a low huff, staring down at your beer bottle. "Guess you were the only one who could've really proved that to him."

"Yeah…" he says, and then takes a swig of his beer.

After a short while of silence, you ask, "Why Sam? Why those kids specifically? I mean, what do they all have in common?"

"Beats me. 'Far as I know, they don't have anything in common besides their ages and abilities. Different birthdays, genders, races… the only other thing is that they all had a fire in their home when they were six months old. Some of them lost family in that fire."

"Like me and Sam…"

"Yeah. That's about all I know on them. They're all dead now besides Sam."

"Yeah, I know." You're staring down at the table, at the wooden patterns that you're mindlessly tracing in thought, and you're thinking, _I just have to know_. You have to know, but it won't change anything. It won't change the way you feel about him. "They died in some kinda...fight to the death test thing. Last one standing gets out, gets to become hell's bitch or whatever. And uh...Sam. He took them all down, didn't he? 'Cause he wanted that gun?"

"Well, not really." His brows are furrowed, as if he doesn't understand where you got that from.

"He didn't?" There is hope in your voice, blooming in your chest, for that little bit of innocence, that little bit of the kid he was before all the horrible things happened, still being left intact.

"Most of em' died by something called the Acheri demon, or killed each other. He did snuff out the last one though, 'cause he tried to snuff him out first. So it's mostly that he didn't do the Sam thing and try harder to talk him out of it, spare his life, but I doubt anything would'a worked at that point anyway." _The son of a bitch lied to me_ , you're thinking. You shouldn't be surprised. It gives you the greatest relief that the kid didn't go on some murder spree to get you out. "Sam didn't fall prey to that yellow-eyed son of a bitch's sweet-talk on gettin' to be high and mighty in Hell, but he did want to get out alive, so he could get you out."

"By opening the gates of hell."

"Ding ding. Give the boy his prize. They sure give ya a lot of intel down there, don' they?"

"Well," you say, shrugging your head. "Just to screw with me. Yeah… so why'd he leave?"

"Opening the gates of Hell didn't do him much good. Azazel said he had no power over your deal, but he did say someone else held the contract. Wouldn't tell who. Made him no use. So next step was t'find out who held the contract, where they were, and how to break it. Enter, Lilith. He's been tryin' to get as much info on her and her whereabouts ever since."

 

**...**

 

"Sam. Where are you right now, son?"

" _Nebraska. What's going on_?"

Nebraska. Where you died, and where you were buried. You can't shake off the conclusion you've reached, no matter how hard you're trying not to believe it.

"Think you can make a drive here?"

" _Bobby, I_ …"

"It's important. Real important."

" _Can it wait? Bobby, I think I'm about to find out something. This demon here… she knows something about Lilith. I just have to get it out of her_."

"Sam...son, this is really, really important, okay?"

" _Not more important than this. I'm sorry, Bobby. Maybe in a couple of days. Or I don't know. You can just tell me over the phone_?"

"I...well, I think you should see it now, and see it for yourself. So I guess we'll just have to come to you then."

" _We_?"

"Text me the address, alright?"

" _Um...sure. Yeah. Okay_."

 

**...**

 

You have all these ideas in your head of what it's going to be like, seeing him again after forty horrible years that are only four months to him. Of your life after. Off-tune and bumpy at first, and then, hopefully, gradually, ease. The way everything used to be before it all, or something like it at least, even if it will be a long way to go.

You have all these things that you think you'll say when you see him, the same things still inside of you that you wanted to tell him back then, before that deal. So much more than what you could manage to convey in that little time at the hospital.

You're inside the motel room he gave the address of on the phone, which you've gotten access to through the help of lockpickers. Bobby's sitting on the bed on the other side of the room, waiting like you.

When the key turns in the lock, when the door opens, he is there, and suddenly you've forgotten words and lost all thought. When his eyes catch yours, you think the same happens to him too.

You didn't expect this, exactly. This onslaught of emotion, the melancholic love and nervousness rushing through your body, pounding in your chest and shrivelling your gut and closing up your throat. It's been half a lifetime, and you feel older than your body is, and there is a tiredness in your soul now that wasn't this deep before, and you still remember thirty years of what it's like to have your heart carved out of your chest.

It still makes your heart big and raw to look at him.

You swallow it all down, a tender smile touching your lips. "Hey, Sammy…"

Something jolts across his face at the old nickname.

You were expecting this though, especially when the wariness and anger (along with a tinge of grief) began to cloud his gaze, even when the rest of his face remained straight and blank. There is a split second of a rapid blurry movement, a twinkle of a silver, and in that split second, your hand shoots out and catches the arm heading your way.

"Who are you?!" he yells.

"Like you didn't do this?!" you bellow back.

"Do what?!"

There is a hard force colliding into your chest, chasing all air out of your lungs, shoving you back and tangling up your feet and making the world tilt backwards as you fall, knocking a grunt out of you as you meet the floor. There is a brief vision, the tube lights behind him making him a shadow above you as he knelt, his knife raised.

And then he's gone.

And then there's Bobby's voice, reassuring him, "It's him. It's him. I've been through this already. It's really him."

You lift your upper body off the ground on your elbows, then place your hands flat, and then flip to your knees. You pull yourself to your feet, and you glance up at them. Bobby has Sam leaning back against a wall with a hand on his chest. He's staring at Sam and Sam's staring at you, the fight wearing out of him, his snarl loosening into a face that reminds you of the child from fifteen years ago before it all, young and innocent (and you never would have been able to tell that he's the same boy who sent countless demons back in Hell during those four months, who opened the gates of Hell for you and aimed a Colt at the yellow-eyed demon's head and shot him dead).

But suddenly lost. Like he's been doing all these things to get here but now that he's here, he doesn't understand how he's supposed to react.

And then there's pain, his face crumpling briefly before schooling back into one just on the edge of crumpling, frowning dolefully, his brows furrowed and jaws clenched in a desperate attempt to hold back tears. That lifelong sorrow again and that longing of looking through a soundproof window at someone who never wanted to look back.

There is a silence of ten long years between you and him, one that you've made a habit out of, a fifty-feet thick barrier, and you feel like you're lost too, on what to say or do, because it's hard to say what you want to say and do what you want to do when there's these past fucked up years in-between.

His loose fists, at his sides, are tense with the momentum of a potential action, caught between desperation and restraint. You see them stutter slightly towards you, and then stop. He swallows, retreats them and presses them back slightly into the wall again, shifts against the cement and looks down at his shoes.

And you would have never known he was the same boy who was supposed to lead hell to Earth some day (because he isn't, you then think. And if he is, then fuck destiny and fate and all the powers that made it so because this is the one kid who represents the good people made for heaven to you).

He huffs a smile, even though his eyes and his face are stung red, and he still doesn't look at you, and he clears his throat and says in a hoarse, brittle voice, "It's, uh...it's good to see you." He says it in a way in which it seems to feel a lot more than that.

"Yeah," you almost whisper, can't get your voice to quite work. You clear your throat, smile lightly. "Yeah. You too." You say it in a way in which it definitely, _definitely_ feels a lot more than that, because it did.

It hurts to see his startled glance at you.

And then there's nothing else to say.

Bobby steps away, seems to realize Sam's not about to try to stab you again. Glances between you and him, and says, "I'll leave ya two to talk." He pats Sam's shoulder and walks away, faint taps of boot against wood as he does, and then the click of a door opening and shutting behind you. Sam doesn't move from where he's leaning against the wall like it's the only thing keeping him on his feet. Keeps staring at the floor and you at him, looking over him. He's gained some mass, removed his dorky fringe that he used to hide behind. He looks older, more weighed down.

There is a distance and time and a silence of a decade between you and him, suffocating you from the inside. It almost feels like trying to know someone new, except there's all this history, all these feelings. You're struggling to catch straws, to find the words to begin with (because there's too much and you can't think straight), to string them together, to find a rhythm that's long been lost.

What do you _say_?

What do you say after all of that?

You gaze down at your hands, and you can't think of an answer.

Sam talks first.

"I'm sorry."

Your head shoots up, perplexed. You shake it as you ask, "For what?"

"You know…" he said, shrugging his shoulders against the wall. "You went to hell. To save my life."

You think about his soft and weary 'I'm sorry's as he dozed off after he told Bobby everything that he later he told you, and you think he has a really shitty habit of apologizing for things that aren't his fault.

"You say that like you made the choice yourself, Sam," you say quietly.

"It doesn't matter."

"Of course it does. I made it, not you." He goes silent at that. You continue, "And I don't regret it. I mean...obviously not somewhere I'd ever want to revisit again. Like, ever, but...I don't regret it for a second."

There's subdued guilt in his face, silently saying, _you won't be feeling that way for long_. But that's not what he actually says.

"You can't not regret that."

"I don't. I can't. I paid for what I did to you."

His head snaps up sharply when you say that. He's looking right at you, the first time he properly looked at you since the past couple of minutes. "You didn't deserve any of that." He says it with so conviction that you think you can almost believe it. "And what _did_ you do to me? Certainly nothing less than what I deserved."

"Sam," you say warningly.

He turns towards you, a little less stuck to the wall, a little less slouched like whatever he's still carrying around is too heavy to hold in his body, and says it blunt and straight, "I killed your _father_ , Dean. So paid for what? For reacting exactly as you should have? As _anyone_ would have?" He doesn't sound angry or strong or argumentative, doesn't really sound much like anything.

" _No_. No." You're finding yourself stepping forward, walking closer and closer as your breaths come out heavier. Your voice is rough and hardened with underlying, controlled anger and emotion as you let it all out, "For not fucking finding out _why_ , for not doing better. I should have been there for you, damn it! No, fuck, I never should have even let it _happen_ to you in the first place. I never should have left you. Not when that bastard sent me away. Not when I abandoned you as soon as I turned eighteen for five fucking years. Not ever. And I certainly never..." You stop, breathing hard, swallow and inhale tremulously, blinking. " _Never_ should have laid a hand on you."

"You're being unfair," he says, still in that low voice that you had grown so used to. But now you want him to yell, to ram his fists into your face, something, _anything_ more than this. You want him to get fucking pissed for what you did, for what you didn't, for being one of the reasons his life got fucked up. And you realize that even if you have paid for your sins, you will still never feel clean of them. "You were angry and grieving, and I never told you, Dean. I was the only one who could have, and I didn't. So you couldn't have known, okay? It wasn't your fault."

"It doesn't matter. You never should have gone through what you did, and and I never should have added more crap to it."

"It does matter. You were just a kid."

"So were you, Sammy…" you say softly, breathless and sad. "God, so were you."

He falls back against the wall, seems for all the world tired and overwhelmed by everything, trembling a little, and averts his gaze yet again. You wonder if it's because it's something he's made a habit out of, from those years he tried to make you forget he was there.

"Yeah, well, if I didn't deserve it back then...I sure as hell deserve it now."

"Don't—"

"You don't know what I've done."

You do know. You don't know if you want him to know that, to know that you still have all your memories from your trip down to the most biblically horrific place for punishment. You don't think he'd ask about it, but you don't want him to know you remember, to have questions about it. You don't want to throw Bobby under the bus, make him seem like some tattletale, because he'd never tell you anything if you didn't already know, or if it was for the best.

"Whatever you've done, Sam… none of it matters, okay? But for the love of fuck, never say that again."

"I've done horrible things for you."

 _So have I_ , you think. _For you_. You think of the choice you made, for Sammy, that set you off on the path you went on, made your hands bloody and broken, made you go mindless and insane for ten whole years.

 _I've done horrible things for you_.

And he's also stood up to his greatest monster for you, and he's left behind the one thing that could have possibly made him happy in any way at all for you, and he's loved you in ways and times that nobody else could have.

You step towards him. "I don't care."

"I thought, as long as you came back, it wouldn't matter how much you hated me. That I'd go through ten more years of it if you'd still be here to do it. I...I'd do it all over again. How fucking pathetic is that?" He huffs a laugh, but it's too watery and it's definitely not funny. It's not fucking funny at all. "So it was either that or breaking the promise you made me make, and I couldn't do that. Not after what you did for me."

You can't think of what to say to that. You wish he'd never talk like that again. "I won't do that to you again."

"You don't know what I've done."

"Fuck," you mutter, rubbing a hand down your face as you look away. You turn your head back at him. "I do, okay? I do know. And I don't _care_."

It stuns him into silence. The way he's staring at you makes you think he doesn't quite believe you.

"I… I heard about it. While I was downstairs. And I mean...I can't tell you that letting out more demons than we've hunted our whole lives was okay, but...if you think that something like that nullifies everything I said to you in that hospital, you're wrong. It still stands. All of it."

Sam opens his mouth, closes it again. He settles for staring at the space between your boots, lost for words. You can't tell what he's thinking, and there was once a time when you could take one look at his face and know what's on his mind and exactly what he needs, but now there's that decade between that time and now, and it's hard (or maybe he just got better at hiding his thoughts because he had to keep his secrets inside of him). There's lines of emotion etched into his face, brows furrowed, and there's a thin layer of tears on the edges of his hazel eyes, his mouth vaguely scrunched up and his nose stung pink.

His arms shift, stutter just the slightest bit towards you, fists clenching, and stop again, like something is holding him back. His knees are trembling, and you're sure he's about to fall.

He doesn't fall all at once.

He crumbles, piece by piece. His body jolts half-way down, caught by that wall he's been holding on to all this time for some kind of support and groundedness, and then slips down all the way to the floor with a sharp, shuddering heave, face twisting completely as everything he had been keeping in finally comes breaking out, hands and shoulders shaking as he rocks forward, head bowed, one hard, gutted sob ripping out of him. Sounds like it holds every ounce of grief he's ever felt in those eleven years, and you feel like you might as well be having your heart and lungs carved out again, the way it fucking hurts to hear him, the way his anguish and your anguish for him knocks into your chest like stones and leaves you airless and aching.

"Sammy…" you say softly, your knees lowering to touch the ground.

"I'm s-sorry," he croaks out, thick and strangled. He swallows, hands fisted into his head. They move down below his ducked face, rubbing at it. "Sorry. I just…" He laughs, tremulous and wet. "I didn't think you'd… I've wanted this so bad, but I never thought…"

"Things'll be better from now on, Sam. I promise." you say, your voice hushed and a little hoarse. He sniffs, rough and congested, sounds like tearing paper. You bend down and lean forward, trying to get a glimpse of his face. "Hey. Look at me. Look at me."

He does, and the anguish and sorrow there almost makes you wish he hadn't, because it fucking _hurts_.

"Sam," you murmur, swallowing, arms tentatively raising up. You reach out and almost touch him, but they're left hovering over his arms instead, and the way he's looking at you makes you feel like he's been silently begging for you to make everything better since that day in 1994 when you left and everything started going wrong, and it makes something deep and unreachable inside of you hurt. "Sammy, come here."

"I don't feel clean," he whispers, almost sobs it out, and it punches you in the gut.

"Doesn't make it true, okay? Now come on." Your vision is growing blurry as you watch him, and your lips are pressed together tightly, jaw clenching briefly with mourn. You wave one hand of your open arms at yourself, jerking your head. "Come on. Let me hold you, Sammy."

You want him to come to you, but you realize he won't. Not now, at least, because he will still remember the foreign, unwanted hands that touched him wrong (as if it made him the fucking dirty one and it makes you feel sick in your heart and your stomach to think that he thinks that), the gun in his hands when he pulled the trigger at the fucker that let it happen to him. He will still remember the feeling of blood on his hands when he stabbed a man that came at him first, the hilt of the Colt when he put it into the lock of the gates of Hell. So you grab him by the collar, haul him into your arms yourself and bury your chin into his shoulder, hands coming around to his shoulder blades and the back of his head, looking up and away through tears that fall in a blink.

When he brings his own arms up after a while to reciprocate the embrace, it's slow, unsure. And then it's firm. And then strong. And then desperate. He doesn't make another sound, but there's water on your neck, cold and wet. You pull him closer to your chest, closing your pinched eyes.

It hurts your ribs, but you don't let go for a long while, and neither does he.

 

**...**

 

When you do let go after a long while, you press a quick, fleeting kiss to his temple before you push him back, keeping your hands on the sides of his neck.

You brush your thumbs over his cheeks and you tell him, "I'm gonna be right here." You stare him resolutely in the eye, even though you can barely see shit through the tears. "I know I'm…" You trail off waveringly, looking up. You scoff at what an understatement that is, what you're about to say, but you puff out air and manage to say it, "I know I'm hell too late now, but I'm gonna help you get through this, whatever that takes." You inhale shakily, biting your lip, nodding. Run your quivering hands over the shoulders of his shirt, tug gently at his collar and whisper firmly to him, "So you tell me what you need, whatever and whenever, and I'll do it. I'm gonna be right here, no matter what, alright?"

Sam nods, smiles wanly but he breathes out like something inside of him's freer.

"Yeah. Good…" You breathe in deep, let it out slowly. You lift one hand up to run it over his head. "Now you gotta tell me what you did to save me, so that we can stop it before it takes you."

It catches him off. His head twitches slightly in puzzlement, and he says falteringly, "Dean, I...I didn't do anything."

"Don't lie to me. You were close to where I was buried, and the whole site looked like a nuke went off. That's not a coincidence, so if you've done something to get me back up here-"

"I-I didn't do it. I wish I had, but I didn't. Dean, I tried everything—" You kind of think you already figured that out. "...I even tried bargaining with demons, but they wouldn't deal. You were in Hell for months. Months. And I'm sorry I couldn't..." There's that habit kicking up again. His voice is breathlessly desperate, weighed with failure and mourn, his face even more so. "I'm sorry I couldn't save you."

"Hey, it's okay, Sammy. You don't have to apologize. I...I get it."

As much as you're relieved to hear that, it leaves a very pressing question unanswered. You wonder who gave you this chance at a second life, at making things right. You wonder if you should be thankful if you still don't feel like you deserve it.

 

**…**

 

"I, uh...I don't know if you want this back but…" he's saying as he takes the amulet out from his collar, off over his head. He piles it into his palm, tentatively holds it out to you. You're staring at it, can't quite remember how to work your vocal chords, because you can see it in your mind's eye again, the memory of that Christmas night when he was eight and you were twelve and you and him could never have even thought of the awful things happening the way they did.

You miss that innocence and simplicity, when Sammy didn't have a hell that he had kept a secret, when you didn't have your own that you don't know if you can ever bring yourself to speak of. You think you'd let the flames of your hell, your secrets, burn you from the inside out before you ever could.

You've been staring at it a little too long it seems, because he begins to slowly retract his hand towards his chest, shifting on his feet as he glances down at them. "I understand if you don't—"

You take it, smiling softly in a way only he could make you. "Thanks, Sammy."

 

**…**

 

It takes him two weeks to ask the question.

"Did you see him there?"

It makes you go still, your fingers freezing around the brush and the gun you're cleaning.

It doesn't take you longer than two seconds to figure out who _him_ is.

You glance up at him, and there's something saddening about the way his gaze is a little too rooted to the guns he's cleaning, about the way his voice goes so quiet (so quiet that you almost didn't understand), how his head is bowed over his task, as if he never said anything. You would have thought you imagined it.

You want to tell him, _I did_. _And I hurt him for you_. But you're not ready to tell him everything else, to see him see you in a way he never had before, something other than the good he still somehow sees in you (you want to keep it forever, or for as long as you can).

"Just in passing," you answer, continue twisting the brush into the gun with a little more vigor, your voice blank and calm, but your jaw tightening and your veins and chest ablaze. "I know he suffered."

Sam nods, doesn't say much else about it. You wonder what he's thinking, but it's hard to figure that out these days.

"I wish you never suffered," he says after a while, almost mumbles it. For some reason that you can't pinpoint, it makes your heart twist painfully.

 

**…**

 

In the end, everything sets itself right, even if it takes years.

It is not easy to move forward after years of being stuck in the same place, to move towards something better.

But eventually (and gradually), there comes a time when he can get into the car and smile at you without hesitance, when you can do the same. There comes a time when you can deliver one-liners and jokes and feel like you're not overstepping, and he will know you're not serious, when he can laugh a little louder than he used to, when he can speak as if he's not trying to be unnoticed.

There comes a time when you can talk without thinking too much about what you can and can't talk about, when he can tell you about the awful things that happened to him, when you can too. When he can ask you things and tell you things without thinking twice about it and when you can do the same. When he can fight with you without worrying that he's pushed you away forever, and when you can get pissed at him without feeling like you've ruined all the progress you both have made, without him retreating into his shell. When you can sit in silence with him and feel like it's not because everything is being held back, or because you can't think of anything that would be okay to say.

There comes a time when touching him without a reason doesn't feel foreign, when all those fucked up years finally fall away completely and it begins to feel as natural as it once was, when he can touch you without looking like he's expecting rejection.

There comes a time when he begins to stand up a little straighter, his head held higher, because his sorrow isn't weighing him down as much as it used to anymore, when the dark circles around his eyes fade away and when his clothes fill out more. There comes a time when he stops trying to live like a ghost, when he solidifies more, becomes more of himself and less of that phantom he had become all these years. When he stops trying to disappear again on his birthdays and third Mays, and when he finally understands that there is nothing bad about these days at all.

"Let's take a day off. Do something fun and relax," you say as you reach over, turning the knob to decrease the volume of 'Enter Sandman' by the Metallica.

"What about the werewolf?" Sam asks, raising an eyebrow.

"Pass it on to someone else," you answer, shrugging. You glance over at him, and he seems reluctant. You sigh. "I feel like we're long overdue for a break, man. Come on." You nudge him with your elbow. "I'll even let you choose what we do if you agree. Where do you wanna go?"

After a couple of seconds of consideration, his shoulders slacken with a low huff, as if he's given in. He shifts, frowning thoughtfully. "Okay, um... there's this museum in Washington about National History—"

"Of course that'd be your idea of a vacation," you mutter sarcastically.

"What? You asked, jerk."

"Yeah, you're right. My mistake, bitch. I should have known you were gonna go for something nerdy and boring."

Sam rolls his eyes, but there's the slightest hint of a smile.

"Well...then where _do_ you wanna go? And for the love of god, don't say a strip club, because I'd rather have my eyes get scratched out by a werewolf any day."

The car is driving on, the open road ahead vanishing endlessly underneath the tires, the roars of engine and low rock tunes sounding like old childhood memories (now tainted with the presence of a man who was meant to ruin it, but still bringing on a sense of nostalgia, for a life before everything became so dark).

He asks you, "well, where do you wanna go?"

There's freedom at the tips of your fingers, and you can go anywhere you want to go, but you can't think of anywhere you could really want to go when you're already home.

You look at him, smiling softly.

And he seems to understand. He grins back at you in the same way, evening sunlight falling over him, and in that moment, you realize that something has gently settled inside of you somewhere along all of this, like your heart fits a bit better in your chest, like your soul isn't too shrivelled and twisted up in your body anymore.

You turn back to face the highway, head tilting sideways in thought. "I was thinking, a beach." You drag out the 'ch', eyes crinkling in a fantasizing smile. You glance at him, smile morphing into a smirk as you reach out to ruffle his hair, saying, "Don't worry, we'll still go to your lame-ass museum—" He pushes your arm off, ducking away and patting down his hair. "—but first...I think I need to do some unwinding, not have my brains go numb with boredom. I mean, think of the sea, Sammy. The sand between our toes. The sun. And all the hot ladies…"

For the first time in too long (since about a decade), you remember again what it's like to not feel like a huge chunk of you is missing, like it has finally fallen in place. You remember again what it's like to take a breath with purpose, what it's like to not feel like an empty corpse walking around waiting to be buried some day, to find a place where you meld into the world seamlessly, because there's a place where you finally belong now, because you can finally imagine your whole life somewhere (when you could barely imagine any life ahead of you once).

It's right here, in this car, next to the kid you were meant to spend it with, that you love more than anything. Next to Sammy.

 

**The End**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!
> 
> I hope I did the happy ending justice, that you enjoyed it. You might think it was kind of cheesy, but I think they deserve to be cheesy after everything that happened to them.
> 
> Here it is. The end. From here on, I've imagined the story to go the same as it does in season four, except less brotherly angst because there's no Ruby here.
> 
> Thank you for all the kudos, the bookmarks, for taking the time to leave the lovely comments! Thank you for still being here, for reading all the way here. It means the world.


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